Amanda Blank

On her full-length debut, I Love You, veteran guest vocalist and electro rap darling Amanda Blank comes across like the bastard daughter of Peaches and Luther Campbell. Her rhymes, while not always pinpoint precise, are raunchy, rapid-fire and a metric ton of fun. The beats, courtesy of Major Lazer partners Diplo and Switch, and Spank Rock's XXXchange, are a dizzying, dance floor-filling array of buzzes, beeps and squelches. On "Gimme What You Got," Blank teams up with old friends Spank Rock to create the sort of hyped-up B-More sound that made their 2006 collaboration, "Bump," a hit. "Shame on Me" is a hooky, catchy chunk of electro ear candy that has Amanda straying far away from her dance/rap roots and testing her skills as a vocalist. "Big Heavy" features more sex rhymes over a modern take on classic disco sounds. I Love You isn't a total aerobics class though. Blank slows the pace down considerably on "A Love Song," an introspective, gender-reversed redo of LL Cool J's "I Need Love." She also cuts the tempo in half on "Lemme Get Some" to create a solid, old school-flavoured performance. I Love You isn't perfect though; Blank sometimes sounds like she's focusing too much on being raunchy and not enough on keeping her flow tight. And the mix of bubbly beats and dirty rhymes occasionally verges on self parody. Still, Blank has succeeded in creating an album that's brash, fun and impossible to ignore.