Everybody Got Their Something

It’s not everyone who can stand in front of a blazing 500-foot billboard of electric lights and still outshine everything in shot. That’s Nikka: daughter of famous Rat Pack-era bandleader-producer Don Costa, possessor of two worldwide platinum albums before she was ten, goddaughter to ultimate goodfella Frank Sinatra himself. And that’s Nikka in the electrifying video, swaggering and monolithic as an attack of fifty-foot women, a medusa’s head of electric red curls flailing down her back, bucking and straddling the mic with the sinewy, no-messing muscularity of a Las Vegas poledancer. Only Nikka Costa’s more likely to own the whole damn club.

So her impeccable music-biz-royalty bloodline explains how she gives such good video. And Costa’s jizzed-up, squalling retro-soul ain’t no slouch either: Stevie Wonder circa Innervisions mixes it up with powerhouse 1970s-vintage fuzzbox rockouts, all squelching analogue keyboards, boomy old-skool reverb and thundering rock-festival drums. Her voice is something else again: a little sacred, a lot profane, somewhere between the end-of-the-world hosanna-howl of prime Aretha Franklin and the bloody-voiced rock-god sex-holler of, amazingly, Robert Plant.

Granted, her more placid, soul-searching downtempo numbers, of which there are several, venture alarmingly close to Sheryl Crow/Vonda Sheppard territory. But when she’s on form – roaring through ‘Tug Of War,’ disco-grooving through ‘Everybody Got Their Something’ or smash-banging into ‘Hope It Felt Good,’ wrecking the joint like a hellcat scorned – Costa’s howling, pheromonal sex-reek makes the manicured pop’n’B of Destiny’s Child, for all their über-woman shapethrowing, sound like the shouting of aerobics instructors at the YMCA.