Alex Winston: 'Sister Wife EP'

You know when you've got a Band Aid stuck on a scab on your knee? It's been there for a week now, so it's getting pretty grim at the rims. You just need to peel it off. That's kind of how it feels writing about Alex Winston - you're just longing to label her "quirky", but you know that would be wrong because she's really much too good for such a hackneyed description.

Allow us to elaborate. Though they're produced by trendy NYC DJ duo The Knocks, the six self-written songs on her debut EP aren't what you'd call club bangers. What they are, however, is gloriously catchy pop tunes, by turns jangly ('Locomotive'), thumpy ('Sister Wife'), singer-songwritery ('Don't Care About Anything'), bring-you-out-in-a-grin-y ('Choice Notes'), girl-groupy ('Sweet James') and kinda Kate Bush-y ('Fingers And Toes'). Every one comes complete with a chocolate truffle of a chorus, though some of these bonbons have a surprisingly bitter centre - 'Sister Wife', for example, seems to deal with a Tilda Swinton-style three-way relationship: "Get the hell out / It's my night! / You don't know the way to his heart like I do." See what we mean about the "q" word not quite being the ticket? We'll opt for "idiosyncratic" instead. It's far classier.


> Click here to watch the video that accompanies 'Locomotive' from the 'Sister Wife EP'