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54 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Why slate Little Boots for what she's not, when what she IS, is this good?, 7 Jun 2009
Perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that the Little Boots "backlash" has kicked off before her debut album has even reached the shops. In fact, let's be honest, it kicked off before her debut single had even reached the shops...and then blew up when New In Town failed to reach the top 10. The problems seems to be as thus; the BBC voted her as the Sound of 2009, she's quite a pretty girl and the height of her ambition seems to be to make catchy pop songs in a world where "pop" is still a dirty word.
Well no one seemed to pour as much vitriol into slamming 2008's "Sound" winner (the dull and derivative Adele) nor 2007's winner (Mika), nor 2006's (Corrine Bailey Rae) and if anyone can tell me that any of that trio are particularly inventive or ground breaking you will be lying through your teeth.
Of course half the journalists slamming her purely for winning that poll forget that it's partly voted for by their brethren, nor do they slate Florence And The Machine (who have two single releases under their belt that never threatened the top 40) who won that Brit award, which really is shameless publicity to the 'n'th degree. But silly me, Florence is a "serious" musician isn't she?
Well with that diatribe out of the way, what is Hands actually like? Well as far as I'm concerned it's really rather good. Obviously some tracks that have been knocking around for months (Stuck On Repeat, Meddle, Mathematics) set the bar pretty high but they are far from the only highlights. Having Phil Oakey duet on the shimmeringly wonderful Symmetry might seem like a gimmick but it not only works, but exceeds all expectations, Tune Into My Heart, with it's icy, mellow sound proves that she's far from a one trick pony whilst upcoming single Remedy is the sort of song that Kylie would kill her producers for.
And therein lies the crux. The pompous music snobs out there will spend the next few months telling us everything that Little Boots isn't (and crucifying her for it) rather than focusing on what Little Boots IS.
The solo credits for a couple of the tracks (Click, Ghosts) show that the choice of producers on the other tracks are just that, a choice and haven't necessarily been forced upon her. At least half the tracks on here are superb and the other half aren't half bad either. Jam packed with catchy and memorable choruses it will do little to convince those that think "pop" is a dirty word and those who kid themselves that "promotion" and "hype" are 21st century inventions in the music industry. Yet despite the hype, the pressure and the (perhaps) inevitable backlash, Victoria Hesketh has proved that all of those of us who kept the faith when all around seemed to be laying into her were right all along. She's definitely a talent. Hands may not be a perfect record, but is a very damn good one nevertheless.
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26 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What pop and dance music have been waiting for, 10 May 2009
Finally Little Boots' debut album has been released! As a long-term fan, in as much as I've been waiting six months for her debut, I already knew a lot of the songs on here - and was so pleased to discover that every track on the album is as great as I'd hoped.
Victoria Hesketh (singer songwriter and a.k.a. Little Boots) is a breath of fresh air to the airwaves. Her music feels modern and experimental, whilst at the same time there is also a definite nostalgia there for the pop rather than dance focussed synth of the 90s. Take the electronic side away and you get something fairly reminiscent of Saint Etienne mixed with Dubstar. Listening to the album as a whole for the first time it also brought back memories of the Human League, so when Phil Oakley's voice suddenly came in on the fantastic duet Symmetry, I thought I must have died because I suddenly found myself transported to musical heaven. This is a great album from start to (hidden track) finish. All the songs are catchy pop/synth numbers with some really great hooks to them, and I can see this album being really big really soon.
If you want to hear more of the tracks before you buy, check out the Little Boots website - as Victoria makes really great use of homemade videos. Not just that, but she's great live and treats her fans with the utmost generosity and respect. Strong contender for pop album of the year.
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7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
how hype can damage an artist, 21 Jul 2009
Now don't get me wrong, winning the BBC's Sound of 2009 poll did not do any real good for Victoria Hesketh. Ironically, this doesn't have anything to do with her talent, which she has in abundance. Winning a poll of that size puts an unrealistic level of pressure on such a newcoming artist. Prestigious publications roar about Little Boots as the new savior of the electro-shed UK scene, the bloggers assure that her mix of YouTube meta-pop geek and DIY songtress (the Tenori-on only made her more alluring) must reveal a new paradigm for the much-maligned dance-pop genre, fashion magazines drool at her street-smart, futuristic-glam fashion sense and hipsters have made ''Stuck on Repeat'' the only pretext to even consider Kylie Minogue as someone worth looking back to. The obese expectations garnered by remixes (always of the same leaked 5 tracks), homemade youtube videos and live presentations have made almost a legion of followers think that Hands has and simply has to be an epoch-making album of the stature of Ziggy Stardust. If this poor girl failed, she would be lost forever and become one entry on the long list of overhyped nothings in the suffocatingly vibrant music globe of the 00s.
Too bad for them. After all those eager listeners put their ears on Hands and decided it was no Ziggy Stardust, scathing reviews have flown at Miss Hesketh like the darts at Hitler's resuscitation. The basic consensus has been ''enjoyable... but predictable''. I ask...isn't that the whole point? Now believe me, I'm not trying to say hype doesn't influence me, but I believe if I had never heard of her and come across Little Boots occasionally and not due to bombarding propaganda, I would have thought the same thing. ''Damn fine electro-pop album''. Because, that is what this album really is, sadly enough for all those people inflating her. It is really just a sonically sublime, melodically predictable and clichéd but hugely and purely enjoyable electro (and I emphasize the word electro) pop record. Is it enjoyment the whole thing Little Boots wants people to experience with her so allegedly ''pop'' music?
Miss Hesketh is surprisingly down-to-earth and modest, she has never hailed herself as anything more ''than a girl that likes pop music and to play with her tenori-on'', or more simply just ''someone who likes to make music''. Most of her revving up comes undoubtedly from the taste-making smothering of indie journalism. Unlike her obvious but idiotically concieved point of comparison Lady Gaga, Hesketh doesn't go around claiming herself as a pop cultural performance artist, or the reincarnation of Freddy Mercury, and doesn't believe that Gaultier-themed exhibitionism or excessively self-glorifying gimmickry will make the cut. (On the other hand, Gaga doesn't hold a sympathy cord with the indie elite as Hesketh does) If we could just get rid of all the press-created mumbo jumbo maybe we would appreciate or even not appreciate Little Boots for what she truly is, and not for what she was expected to be or would have been.
So what is this album all about? I'm gonna go back to the sentence that for me sums up the record: ''Damn fine electro-pop album''. Electro-pop and not pop, because the synths, big, loud synths, distorted, cheesy, sassy or however you like them, is what create the dance-oriented backbone to this album, more than any other production tricks linked to pop music (you won't find some of the oddball Girls Aloud stuff if that's your idea of pop). Let's drop the comparisons with Kylie, Girls Aloud or Rachel Stevens and look at something that will draw you in closer. Remember Goldfrapp's Supernature? Remember most of it was decadent glam-pop yet it had three proper synth-laden dance-pop tracks? Yes, I also fell in love with ''Koko'', ''Fly Me Away'', and ''Number 1'' and wish Goldfrapp would have indulged a bit more on that for that record, but I'm glad to see that Little Boots has been inspired by the same gloriousness of those songs and expanded them into a 12-set song album. It's not the only thing Little Boots and Goldfrapp have in common though. Both are ravished by that same nature-as-hedonism-tinged imagery and succesfully weld it into gloriously escapist Euro-trashy dance-pop (with mentions to planets aligning, landslides, earthquakes, mathematics), both like to put as much dramatic echo on their ethereal vocals as to make us feel that they are poor little girls falling into a overwhelming, juggernaut synth-pop space void (just look at the cover of Hands) which gives it all no matter how frothy-sounding, a quite epic feel. Both look a bit similar, with Hesketh resembling a perkier teenage sister. Hands really takes on the synth pop ambitions of Supernature and that's what I would most compare it to, even though that album is slightly more aged than the other pop starlets Little Boots is compared to on a day to day base. The spacey, starry-eyed bliss of ''Click'' or the urgent disco assault of ''Mathematics'' best prove the lost Italo-disco classic Supernature could have been but wasn't. Other tracks also invite comparisons with different artists, while some are product of Little Hands' unique idyosincrasies. ''Stuck on Repeat'' with its melodramatic chord progression and swirling production even rivals the source it is supposed to be a remake of (just listen to this song and you'll figure out which), and is an instant classic, indie or pop. Personally I'm not too crazy either about ''New In Town'' (which sounds a bit too slick and straightforward compared to the rest of the album) and ''Remedy'' (which, produced by RedOne, sounds like a grandiloquent GaGa outtake that is laughably unfit for our girl's modest, classier brand of dance pop). Yet the rest of the tracklist has its share of amazing moments. Even as she apes the sounds of others and borrows from numerous clichés of this type of music, her own un-selfconscious, elegant and passionate way of playing around with them still makes up for great music. ''Hearts Collide'' must be making Kylie shaking back and forth on why she has been spending a decade writing about 40 similar songs as this one and none nearly as great. ''Earthquake'' is an emotional, poignant club stomper (led again by loads of echoey, juggernaut synths) which is Little Boots own ''Call the Shots''. ''Ghosts'' is a spellbinding, pirouetting ode at Kate Bush, led again by those otherwordly, sparkling synths. ''Meddle'', possibly the darkest song on the record, takes some of the abrasive, brassy production seen as of late in Pharell and Timbaland to aid a quite schizophrenic yet seductive number (its lyrics, simple as they are, are the best in the whole album). There are times when the aping and the cheese can get to extremes though....''Tune Into My Heart'' is a bit too soap-operaish for me and the collaboration with the Human League's Phil Oakey (''Symmetry'') is amazing yet really brings up the question if collaborations with ''legends'' leave the artist in danger of being eclipsed by the collaborator's famous sound. Closer ''No Brakes'' is simply a gorgeous piece of melancholy electro-pop.
If there is one thing I would criticize this record is its lack of edge. No that that undermines any of its enjoyability, but at times in that maelstrom of laser beams, synths, ah-ahs and whatever else, her own personality sinks. The album as a whole needs a bit more grit, a bit more sexiness...it feels a bit too polished and detached to really be memorable. It is hugely enjoyable but Miss Hesketh will be greatly benefitted if one day she doesn't mind that much about creating instantly hookish, glossy electronic pop and let herself drop down a bit to earth from her space-pop heaven, even if the results are a little rawer, awkward or not as immediately engaging. I'm sure she has depth and knows a lot about subtlety (if she didn't I wouldn't be saying this) and she could show it, without necessarily sacrificing the pop she so much likes. But nevertheless, this is a simple, enjoyable, brilliantly produced ''damn fine'' electro-pop album, which I think is the only thing this woman ever wanted it to be.
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