Album review: Little Boots

LITTLE BOOTS: HANDS

***

679, £12.72

OF ALL the new female artists to have emerged this year – including chartbusters Lady Gaga and La Roux, the stage-diving Florence and the Machine and young pop chanteuses Pixie Lott and Paloma Faith – Little Boots, aka Victoria Hesketh, a 24-year-old former Pop Idol auditionee from Blackpool, has been the most voraciously tipped for the top. So far this year, the Popjustice website has hailed her as "the future of pop" and she came top in the BBC Sound Of 2009 poll, compiled from the predictions of a crack team of music biz folks. Adele was the Sound of 2008 and Mika the Sound of 2007, so its past form on future performance has indeed been sound.

But it's not just the industry which has embraced her enthusiastically. Hesketh first came to wider attention in that most 21st century of fashions – via a succession of clips she uploaded to YouTube, featuring home-recorded cover versions of tracks by artists as diverse as Joni Mitchell and Wiley. An artist of her times, she is a confirmed blogger and Twitterer.

Now, confronted with the Teflon-coated synth pop of current single New In Town and its similarly conceived siblings on her eagerly awaited debut album, it is obvious why big things have been predicted for her. Hands is as commercial as they come, a big, brazen pass at daytime radio and gay discos, produced to within an inch of its life.

But the future of pop? Should that accolade not go to the innovators, to those who hack their way through virgin territory, to those who – as the Mighty Boosh would have it – go prospecting for the New Sound? At best, Little Boots – the alias comes from her nickname Caligula, meaning "little boot" in Latin – is the present of pop, maintaining the status quo on the production line by collaborating with songwriters and producers who have already worked for Lady Gaga, Lily Allen, The Spice Girls and the artist with whom Little Boots' music can most readily be compared: Kylie.

The distinction here – if you care about this sort of thing – is that Hesketh conceives, writes and produces her own material. She's been playing piano since she was five and has become a regular synthesiser junkie, using everything from the humble Stylophone up to the bells and whistles of the Tenori-On. The first music she remembers responding to was by Blondie and Kylie.

Her favourite artists are Kate Bush and David Bowie, though these days she says she is influenced by "anything on the Radio One playlist". But her control over her own output isn't what's going to get her on that same playlist – it's those mindless electro pop tunes, such as New In Town with its mechanically catchy chorus.

Inspired by her first visit to Los Angeles, it just about captures the mix of trepidation and anticipation felt by the new arrival. There's a slight air of menace and compulsion to her guided tour of the bright lights, delivered with a tad more character than the tracks which follow.

Earthquake, the first of many songs on the classic clubby theme of the quest for compatibility, takes the view that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger against a backdrop of epic ravey synthesisers, and sounds like the efficient dancier moments from the current Girls Aloud album.

The Giorgio Moroder-inspired Stuck On Repeat was apparently composed with Kylie in mind. "You got me stuck on repeat, I can only move to the beat" is, indeed, a very Kylie thing to sing. Hearts Collide also exhibits a Minogue-like lightweight sultriness.

Ploughing onwards past the hypnotic, shiny Euro electro of Click and the immaculately processed pop of Remedy, we arrive at the semi-industrial clank of Meddle, which is simultaneously reminiscent of Daft Punk and the Eurovision Song Contest. The relatively quirky Ghosts is another Eurovision contender, with its electro baroque feel.

Mathematics may just be the first synth pop song to be inspired by a Sylvia Plath poem (Love Is A Parallax). In celebration, Little Boots really milks that maths metaphor, extending it into the next track, Symmetry, on which she duets with Human League frontman Phil Oakey.

Hands is nothing if not consistent, as relentless and shallow a sugar rush as Madonna's Confessions On A Dancefloor album, but with no aftertaste to reward repeat listens. It's an opaque introduction to an artist so many people seem to be excited about (or are they just excited at the thought of how many records she will sell?).

There is scant sense of Little Boots the singer and songwriter until the hidden track at the end – a mercifully electronica-free zone called Broken Heart, featuring Hesketh at the piano singing in her untreated Lancashire tones, telling us something about herself rather than airbrushing out the personality.

CRITIC'S CHOICE

Nick Garrie

Captain's Rest, Glasgow, 13 June

ONLY the second ever Scottish date for this cult baroque folk pop artist from the 1960s, now benefiting from the patronage of Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake and chief BMX Bandit Duglas Stewart, among other Glaswegian movers and shakers, with whom he has recorded a new album, 49 Arlington Gardens.

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