- Label
- 679
- Release date
- 8th June 2009
- Genre
- Pop
- Buy this album
- Order CD
2009’s most likely to lives up to the hoopla.
When everyone, including your Dad, starts tipping the same artist it's hard not to be cynical that some evil marketing hype isn’t taking place. Such premature acclaim can ruin careers as much as build them but perhaps the biggest surprise of Little Boots’ debut is that it’s worthy of those great expectations.
Little Boots’ sound may be a stylish spread of trendy-pleasing electronic genres but the reality is that Hands is simply just a straight-up great pop album – and in the old fashioned sense one that’s jammed to bursting with hooks, catchy choruses and hit singles. Of the dozen tracks here only the baroque Abba-esque Ghosts struggles to please but offers a midway pause to the full-on pop action.
Little Boots faces stiff competition for finest female retooling of eighties synth-pop (La Roux and Ladyhawke are at it too and that’s just the letter L) but there’s far less knowing irony to Hesketh – and that’s despite a duet with Human League’s Phil Oakey on Symmetry. Marvelous it is. If Smash Hits still exists she’d be on the cover every other week for the rest of the year – and rightly so.
More to try:
Human League: Dare
Hot Chip: The Warning
Saint Etienne: Foxbase Alpha
Girls Aloud: Out Of Control
