Natalia Kills (and Poirot investigates)

If you're already fairly tuned in to the Internet's various "buzz" channels for new music, you may have heard the name Natalia Kills being bandied about here and there. And with some good reason. Natalia is the product of the amazing Cherrytree Records who are directly responsible for launching the career of a certain Lady Gaga whilst also having on their books artists such as La Roux, Ellie Goulding and Keane. Heavyweight stuff, but what about the content?

Well, funny you should ask, because Natalia is about to hit the promo trail hard ahead of the UK release for her debut single Mirrors, the video for which you can check out below.

The comparisons with Lady Gaga here are fairly self-evident. Setting aside the fact that vocally, we're clearly heading for similar territory as Just Dance, you've got the apparently-obligatory stylized presentation complete with masks, axes and, for extra subtlety, plenty of mirrors. The track itself is respectably catchy, with "And the mirror's going to fall tonight" constituting a fairly meaty hook. The backing track in particular calls to mind what might happen if Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) had an unfortunate accident with Kelly Clarkson's guitarist. Which is to say it's catchy, but let's stop trying to pretend someone wasn't flicking through their old Eurythmics albums and thought "wouldn't it be great if we could slap this on a pop song in 2011?". In any event, Mirrors is a decent enough debut which sets out Natalia's stall nicely, even if it doesn't quite set the old pulse a-racing.

The other tracks made available by the kind people at Cherrytree are delivered in much the same vein. Zombie is a similarly and dark and brooding affair which is fairly unrelenting in its sinister recapitulation of the "my boyfriend's a monster but I'm not exactly turned off by that idea so let's see where it goes" trope. Activate My Heart sees Natalia channel her inner Robyn and basically delivers Fembot in so far as it's playing on the whole "I've turned into a robot as a result of heartbreak" but, typically, in a downbeat fashion. In fact, that pretty much sums up the Natalia Kills experience so far: downbeat. There's very little levity on offer here to try and cheer the listener up a bit. In our experience this can go one of two ways. Either it will really help Natalia carve out a niche as the "dark" Gaga, or it will cause her listening base to become thoroughly depressed and abandon her for something a bit less heavy. It's a fairly risky strategy, and one which esteemed critic Popjustice has already begun to notice some flaws in.

In conclusion, our advice would be as follows. Enjoy Mirrors, it's alright and as debuts go does the job fairly well and definitely borrows from the right bits of pop's murky history. As for the post-Mirrors landscape, in the immortal words of Karen Walker from Will and Grace, we'd advice grabbing a bottle, hunkering down and praying for daylight.