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CD Reviews

Nadia Oh

Hot Like Wow | Tiger Trax

By DANIEL BROCKMAN | April 29, 2008

3.5 Stars

In relative terms, no music is “good” or “bad” — it just needs to be heard in an appropriate setting. A cursory listen to the debut album by UK grime diva Nadia Oh might lead one to believe that the “appropriate setting” involves a stack of dollar bills and a pole — but if this is the kind of strip-club banger that will oust Alice Cooper’s “Poison” from the playlist, it really shows how tables have done turned. Hot like Wow has a singular obsession: Ms. Oh’s relentless desire to stalk and mentally undress the boy of her dreams. Aside from the occasional “You know I’m hot,” Nadia is not interested in telling us how her body’s too bootylicious for us. Instead, we get lines like “I bet you look better/With no clothes on” and “I know your name/And I got your number.” This is the male gaze subverted amid a subterfuge of crunk and sleaze, and it fits in with the recent UK trend of women taking the domineering role in courtship. The music combines Middle Eastern Eurovision scuzz with Justice-y distorto-beats, and Nadia’s delivery combines the smutty-yet-bored delivery of Samantha Fox with the up-for-anything naïveté of Stacey Q. It all comes together in what amounts to a naughts-y update of ’70s porn-to-disco one-hit wonder Andrea True Connection.

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Topics: CD Reviews , Alice Cooper

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