Little Boots – Hands album review

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?