Little Boots - Hands album review
1 comment | Published by Rach Read |
If you don’t know who Little Boots is, welcome back from your stint on Mars. Victoria Hesketh, the synthy stunner from Blackpool, has gone from bashing her keyboard in her bedroom on Youtube to having near-blanket press coverage over the past 6 months, following her crowning as the BBC’s Sound of 2009. Unlike previous winners Mika and Adele though, neither a number one single nor album lay in wait. But does that mean that her debut album Hands isn’t any good? Far from it…
Lead single New In Town only making 13 in the charts must have been a disappointment – and any long-time Boots fan, seeing a dolled-up Hesketh watch as couples dry-humped to slick choreography in its video, must have seriously wondered if the naïve charm of her early demos had been lost entirely. New In Town seems to have been released more for the sentiment behind the lyrics rather than for the strength of the song itself and as an opening album track, rather than a lead single, it is rather good – a tantalising promise of the batch of excellent electro that is to come.
The best of these is Remedy. If ever there was a smash-hit-in-waiting, this is it. Somehow managing the trick of being both instantly catchy and still wondrous a few weeks on, it really is a moment of sheer magical magnificence. Other early favourites are the crunching bass of Meddle and the loveliness of Earthquake and Mathematics – only problem… we heard these tracks months ago. The downside of Boots’ early online success is a slightly dull feeling of ‘heard it all before’. You want albums to be new, exciting and shiny and when only Remedy and Symmetry (a gorgeous duet with The Human League’s inimitable Phil Oakey that sounds supremely 80s in the best possible way) of the ‘new’ tracks match up to the quality of the ‘old’ ones, that spark is lost.
Elsewhere, Hesketh veers towards the twee on tracks like Tune Into My Heart and No Brakes while the marching-band-esque backing of Ghosts seems misplaced in the track-list. Boots’ ability to impart charm on the sometimes glacial and personality-free field of synthy electro is one of her most winning assets and this sees her through. Rather than being the album of blinding brilliance that many bloggers hoped for, Hands is an accomplished debut that hints at great things to come.
What do you think of Hands?
Eric Henwood-Greer
It was inevitable, I suppose, that Boots’ release would turn out to be something ofd a disappointment (more obnoxiously, but also inevitable is the amount of backlash she’s received). I have to admit, I think I reacted to the album more strongly than this review partly because I did avoid listening to nearly all the demos and leaked tracks, by some kinda miracle.
That said, I feel almost embarassed to admit how much I love the album. From reviews, I was expecting not to like Ghosts at all (it’s the track most hated by critics it seems), but I think in the context of the album it actually plays well (well, I try to avoid paying any attention to the lyrics on that one). Similarly I love Tune Into My Heart--it’s classic old school Pascal Gabriel in terms of his production work on it--reminds me a bit of his Kylie bside Tightrope meets some of his early Peach (or Peach Union here in Canada) tracks. AND I like No Brakes--but I’m likewise a bit fan of Biffco’s production work (they’re, even if they lack the cool factor, my fave of Kylie’s Parlophone producers). However, again in these cases, I have to admit to ignoring most of the lyrics.
Here in Canada, all we got was an EP which had New in Town (which is getting more airplay here than I ever expected it to in the N American market--though that doesn’t mean much), Stuck on Repeat, and then the bsides Magical, Not Now, and her cover of Love Kills. Love Kills was what got me into her--the original Freddie Mercruy tune is perhaps my favorite 1980s track by my favrotie producer Giorgio moroder (it or the Phil Oakey album he did) so it’s nice to have and the two rarer tracks are charming--and do, perhaps, benefit from being more demo-ey than the album itself. I have the UK CD though and have played it at a LOT of parties the past couple of weeks (it’s Pride season here) and have gotten more questions and complements on the CD than I have on nearly any other “rarer” (to Canada) CD I’ve played.