Quio

Now that Lady Sovereign and Dizzee Rascal have conditioned enough ears to accept the kind of flow that rhymes “garage” with “carriage,” German electro-queen Quio isn’t going to seem like such an anomaly. Wisely ditching the “MC Looney Tunes” moniker she used in her early days as a sideshow in the Berlin club scene, Quio connected with producer AGF to create the kind of minimalist bleep and clatter championed by Deutschland giants like Kompakt and Satubgold. The songs on Like Ooh! are tiny but potent, their spidery rhythmic skitter feeling more like a suggestion than a command. Synths spark up and vanish like lens flare, and AGF pastes in odd snatches of symphonies and whirlybird guitar to delirious effect. More important, though, the music leaves plenty of room for Quio to scat and to scold. She has a deft, bossy voice, like a precocious grade-schooler who’s smart beyond her years and knows it. She also has a limber tongue, and shows no strain when rattling off long strings of similar syllables. “Don’t hold me back from delivering my masterpiece,” she warns early in the record. Who would dare?