Charting the rise of "the gangsta Nancy Sinatra"

 
What does authenticity matter in pop? It’s a debate as old as pop itself, but one that is raging particularly furiously in the blogosphere at the moment. This is thanks to the spectacular rise of Lana Del Rey – a proposition so perfect many commentators have applied the obvious logic that she can’t be true.

With the striking prettiness and retro styling of a Mad Men girl (sufficient to yield a deal with major modelling agency Next Model Management), a heartbreakingly vulnerable voice that seems to carry with it every pang and pain of love, and the tagline of “the gangsta Nancy Sinatra”, greatness awaits the 25-year-old New Yorker.

It is likely to be confirmed through her debut album, Born to Die, which arrives off the back of her YouTube-sensation debut single, Video Games (18 million views and counting). One of the best songs of last year – all minor piano chords, slithering strings and naked turmoil about hanging off a guy who treats her like shit – it united critics in praise (and won over David Cameron) while also provoking forensic analysis of everything from Del Rey’s background to how much botulinum toxin might or might not have gone into her pout.

A puppet of devious industry svengalis or a rare ‘4-real’ pop polymath (she claims to write all her songs and make her own videos)?

Even the Polydor president Ferdy Unger-Hamilton has joined the debate. “She likes to control every aspect of her career,” he told Q. “Lana is that rare thing: someone who can do it all.”

Considering that a previous album,released independently under her given name of Elizabeth Grant, has been mysteriously suppressed while she has quietly teamed up with songwriters Eg White (Adele, Duffy) and Guy Chambers (Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue), that seems hard to fathom.

But when the end product is clever, complex and at times sad enough to make Adele sound like Rebecca Black, who cares?

Young Minneapolis quintet Howler aren’t manufactured, but they may as well be, so neatly do they fit a certain mould. Their debut album, America Give Up, isn’t a bad listen – its dedication to full-tilt melodic, fuzzy garage rock and frontman Jordan Gatesmith’s louche slur pleasingly recall how The Strokes used to sound before they became bored.

It’s just very ordinary, framing Howler as this year’s Vaccines or Drums or (insert name of any photogenic NME-friendly skinny indie band here); in other words, the safe choice of tastemakers unwilling to stick their necks out in the 2012 tips lists – the same tastemakers who incidentally failed to spot Lana Del Rey coming a year ago.

Speaking of the tips lists, it would have been nice to see Fránçois & the Atlas Mountains featuring larger. Their sensual blend of electro-glazed afrobeat, indie-pop, jazz and vocals, half in English and half in French, on second album E Volo Love is truly magnifique.

Also worth watching in 2012 is the Canadian otherworldly electro-pop chanteuse Grimes, who has just signed with the 4AD label for the release of her new Visions LP, due out in March. This will be something very special indeed, if her sublime first cut, Genesis, is anything to go by.