Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 08/06/09
Label: 679/Atlantic

While launching your pop career with a lousy song is rarely a great idea unless you're a Simon Cowell puppet (as Little Boots once hoped to be), there are subtler dangers in starting with one which is just too good. Pop stars as different as Kim Wilde, t.a.t.u and Mika all spend their days in the shadow of a breakthrough so brilliant they can't match it. And while Little Boots' "Stuck On Repeat" wasn't a commercial juggernaut like "All The Things She Said", it was still so ambitious, assured and melodically radiant that most who heard it on its white label release last year instantly anointed her "Saviour of Pop" and "Scourge of Landfill Indie".

Over a year later and things may not look quite so bright for Victoria Hesketh (aka Little Boots), despite the adulatory press. It's not that rivals La Roux and Lady GaGa have commercially overtaken her, nor, as early hipster fans have sniped, that she has sold out by working with the most fashionable producers money can buy ("Stuck On Repeat" and the similarly early, thrillingly bubblegum "Meddle" were ample proof of her pop intentions). It's just that "Hands", for all its glossy, busy ambition, doesn't quite live up to the DIY energy and sheer pop pizazz of those earliest songs.

The album does open with a terrific trio of tunes: the sassy single "New In Town" (all buzzing synths and bubbling melodies), the full throttle disco drama of "Earthquake" and the still mind-bendingly brilliant "Stuck On Repeat". But then comes "Click", the first of a few new songs with a melody too undernourished to cope with the ten ton truck production piled on top of it. The same can be said of "Ghost" and "Symmetry", with its surprise (read: predictable) Phil Oakey duet.

That Oakey cameo reflects the album's other major flaw: a weakness for '80s kitsch which is just as backwards-looking as Oasis' Beatles-bothering. Take "Tune Into My Heart", which begins streamlined and full of intent, its keyboards rippling like muscles, before the chorus is buried under the kind of deliberately tacky, cheap synths you'll last have heard on a 5 Star b-side.

None of this would matter so much if "Hands" didn't provide so many frustrating hints of how good it could have been. As well as the singles, there's "Hearts Collide" (sleek and intelligent as the new Pet Shop Boys album), the alternately deadpan/irrepressible "Mathematics" and the RedOne-produced "Remedy", with its monster electro riff and quicksand chorus. On these songs, Little Boots seems nearly as distinctive and flamboyantly talented as when she first emerged, and they make you hope and believe she will still live up to that early promise. But for now, "Hands" is both exciting and inconsistent, an uncertain step in very much the right direction.

    by Jaime Gill