Elle B. has the blues. The I-love-you-madly-why-did-you-lie-to-me blues intoned by music’s most fabled heroines. It is a familiar narrative: Nina seeped into our soul with her uncanny, God-given bellow, Billie delivered down-home despair’so sweet, so bitter, so Aug’and Mary J pulled our guts out with deep, fiery trills of love lost (and eventually won). These women were in the fight of their lives’silencing critics, competing for recognition in a male-dominated industry, and, perhaps, overcoming the biggest hurdle of all: learning how to love themselves in the face of heartbreak. So how could emerging R&B singer Elle B. not speak to love and agony and pain, much like her foremothers: sentiments that shape her debut’Elle B.: The EP? The five-track offering is indeed the blues, with a bit more pop, more, as they say, umphf! At times Elle sounds quite commercial (’Alibi’), but when everything is just right’journeying to the dark, unforgiving catacombs of heartache on “Fight of My Life”’she delivers nothing short of naked, human emotion. ‘Fight of My Life’ is easily the best track on The EP‘intimate and yet so powerful, Elle soars above subtle violins and a pounding backdrop. Elle’s greatest hardship proves her greatest triumph and, as in all great dramas, love wins’again and again and again.

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