Jay-Z’s latest project is this elfin 19-year-old northwest Londoner, whose cheeky spitball of an EP, “Vertically Challenged,” indicates that, as Def Jam president, he’s certainly casting his net wide. Pitching herself as a linguistically tricky “white midget,” assembling a reputation for crazy live gigs and already able to boast remixes by Adrock (“A Little Bit of Shhh”) and Ghislain Porter (his remix of “Fiddle With The Volume”), Lady Sov wastes little time in negating her auto-applied “Feminem” tag. She’s more about hands-in-the-air breakbeats, Colecovision sound effects, nut-job lyrics delivered in great Cockney fashion (“J. Lo’s got a body / Well you can’t see mine because I wear my trousers saggy”) and the dizzingly appealing sense that she has very little idea where her rhymes are taking her at any given time. She’s a wee Dizzie Rascal on about a truck-and-a-half of Red Bull. — Jeff Vrabel
