Six months after the release of Lazarus Impulse, Roxie Cola (a.k.a. DJ Lil Stuart, a.k.a. Skylar) has released a new five-track album, Neon Heart. Imagine the half-spoken, half-sung, wholly-twisted vocoder vocals of Future or Kanye on 808s and Heartbreak, pull back the hip-hop elements a bit but keep some of the pop sensibility, and you’re getting close to the space that Roxie Cola occupies on this release.
Marked by an assortment of tweaked-out synths, programmed drums and vocoder-twisted vocals, Neon Heart makes for an interesting listen. And that’s to say nothing of the lyrics.
Lyrically, Roxie Cola tends towards an indie-pop style. The lyrics are relatively straightforward, but often just weird enough to be interesting. Take a few lyrics on “Flatline.” Whenever you smile and your eyes are gleaming, you make me feel like I’m human for the first time / Yeah, you make me feel like I’m human after all, cause when you’re around I feel my heartbeat start to flatline, Roxie sings. Those last two lines are what does it for me. Love makes Roxie feel human—like a human whose heart is about to stop beating. Not a bad description of falling in love, if you ask me.
But at other points in the album, I began wondering if Roxie Cola was aiming for irony. Take the saccharine-sweet tween pop lyrics of “Baby.” Roxie sings, Do you like me? / Or am I crazy? / Cause when you talk to me, I feel like a baby. I’m hoping this is a muted jab at the tween-pop genre rather than an artistic stab in the dark, but artists’ intentions are often notoriously hard to pin down.
Then there’s “V8.” It is the one song on which, I think, the irony is undeniable. It also happens to be my favorite track on the album. “V8” is, essentially, Roxie Cola making a hick-hop track. It features an acoustic guitar, perhaps the only acoustic instrument on this synth-heavy album. But Roxie’s lyrics are what steal the show. She say she wanna ride in my truck, it’s a V8 / When I pull up she can hear me from a mile away / We can stay out on the town real late, sipping moonshine in the moonlight, it’s a date.
The melody is wonderfully catchy, and the lyrics are just weird and amusing enough to endure. I’m still grinning at the line Anime girls looking pretty at the tailgate, country boys mad cause they could never imitate. And production-wise, it’s pitch-perfect. I’m especially loving the glitchy outro. As a result, my new New Year’s wish: SMO drops a guest vocal on here for a remix, but that’s just me.
While this album may not please everyone, give it a listen. And then listen to some of Roxie Cola’s previous releases. The artist has range. And that’s a good thing. We need artists that continually surprise us.
