Little Boots: Hands
Little Boots: Hands is released on June 8th
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Monday, 08, Jun 2009 09:25
Atlantic/679, out June 8th.
In a nutshell...
Nearly living up to the hype
What's it all about?
Back in January when the world was a more innocent place, free from all this boring nonsense about some MPs eating a Kit Kat they weren't supposed to (or something ), literally everyone in the whole world - well lots of journalists anyway - decided that a northern lass going by the stage name Little Boots was 'the next big thing'.
Boots got written about an awful lot and everyone got really, really, really excited about her forthcoming album. It was all rather strange as she'd actually been kicking around on the internet for ages. No matter, the tastemakers had decided she was amazing and the world had to know.
Five months down the line, the pop singer finally gets round to delivering her debut album, and it turns out all those Guardian journalists were right - she is a great female pop star making amazing pop songs with an electro-bent. It's justly a pity La Roux is about 7 per cent better.
Who's it by
Little Boots is really called Victoria Hesketh and she has a brother who likes Donk music. That second fact is not that important but does show she's from 'Up North' where that sort of thing is popular. Victoria used to be in a band called Dead Disco and even took part in Pop Idol, but didn't do very well with either.
So she got herself a first and started making music on her own, in her bedroom, in her pants. At some point in 2008, people started noticing her rather good electro covers of pop songs on YouTube and what A&R people like to call 'a buzz' started to build up about her. She worked with one of Hot Chip on the song 'Stuck on Repeat' and appeared on Later.. with Jools Holland.
By the end of the year, that 'buzz' had become fully-fledge adoration and Boots topped a BBC list of the 'Sound of 2009' - joining such past winners as Keane, Adele and um... Mika.
Undaunted, Tori kept working on her debut record, working in LA with a host of famous producers to get it done.
Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys
Hands is clearly a great pop record. Meddle and Stuck on Repeat remain maybe two of the best five pop songs of the last year. Which means that there is a good chance of Little Boots getting some awards when the time comes. She's a shoe-in for the Popjustice version of the Mercury Prize for certain. But a Grammy? The Americans have got their own blonde electro-pop star in the form of Lady GaGa. She might be a talentless tea-cup carrying idiot but she's really popular and probably way more likely to get all the Grammys.
What the others say
"People who like to theorise about pop as much as they listen to it will like Hands." - Pete Paphides, Times
"Hands falls victim to attempts to reach beyond more boundaries than necessary, and thus ironically loses the concentration of the more earnest listener." - Joe Zadeh, Clash Music
So is it any good?
There was so much hype that it was nearly impossible for Little Boots' debut album to live up to all those expectations. That said, Hands does actually come dangerously close to being an absolutely stormer of a pop record.
Kicking off with single New in Town, this is a record that wears its pop heart on its sleeve. You get infectious chorus lines and a pretty danceable bassline. There's a quirkiness too about the opening songs that hints that Victoria wants to be among the Kylies and Girls Alouds, rather than the Atomic Kittens or Spice Girls. This isn't processed music designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
That said, not everything on the record is amazing. Earthquake has a great chorus, but the rest doesn't really get going. The same goes for Ghosts and Tune into my Heart. But when Little Boots gets it right - like on Remedy and Symmetry - she shows that she's a pop force to be reckoned with.
Stuck on Repeat and Meddle, remain, however, by far the best songs on the album and the fact that they are both nearly a year old, makes listening to them now a slightly odd experience. Since we fell in love with them last summer, La Roux's come along and distracted us with all that red hair and 80s attitude.
It's also a tragedy that Little Boots' brilliant cover of Freddie Mercury's Love Kills is not included on the CD version of the album.
In the end, Little Boots has made a record that comes close to greatness. Pity that we were made to believe in January that we'd be getting something that was simultaneously save pop music, the world economy and climate change. Nothing can ever live up to that much hype.
8/10
James Cooper