Little Boots - "Stuck on Repeat"

yeah love this, derivative as it may be - it's by the long haired guy in Hot Chip no?

Yeah, one of the Hot Chip guys anyways, not quite sure of the hair length. And the singer is apparently from Dead Disco, though that means very little to me, honestly.

The 2+ minute long build in the middle of this is sooo great.

I'm slightly surprised she hasn't gotten more attention on here. Seems like pretty great pop songs, and she does this YouTube covers series, and she writes all her songs, using a Tenori-on and a stylophone and other strange instruments. On the other hand, it's produced by the Hot Chip guy, it's pop, and her YouTube covers series is a bit obvious.

Can't stand her. Saw her on Jools Holland and it was like Faith Brown impersonating Kate Bush while playing PacMan. Guardian Weekend cover story before she's even put any records out - enough to put anyone off.

Bored with all these Blue Square indie also-rans being hyped up as some sort of "I'm mad, me" pseudo-newness (see also Florence and the Machine etc. or rather, don't).

Freak-folk's influence on pop, perhaps?

> Can't stand her. Saw her on Jools Holland...

i was very taken with her JH appearance, just her, a piano, a stylophone and japanese beatbox thing. i liked the way she spent a couple of seconds at the start programming the drum loops from scratch. i liked the way she'd be playing the bass with her left hand and the stylophone with her right. i liked the way the clapping didn't get picked up by the mic for the first few bars before she adapted. i liked that she'd had her hair done especially because she was on tv. i liked the general autonomy of it, just her and 3 instruments doing everything (unlike the Monkey thing on the same show which needed a cast of thousands, and a panda).

(reminded me of everything i like about the pastels, somehow.)

agree with all of that (except being reminded of the pastels but then i don't know them too well)

Yeah, it's kind of nice that her live shows are hap dash, but her recorded output is polished and pop. It really boils down to how you feel about pop for the recorded stuff.

Regardless, it's relevant, because she was just voted BBC's "Sound of 2009," she was recently remixed by Alexander Robotnick (that's some serious street cred), and she was on the cover of the Fader, yet she hasn't even put an album out... That's a lot of pressure for her to make it good, no?

I personally like the stuff, but I'm a popfreak.

Stuck On Repeat is a bit too diffident to really engage me, its a bit 00s electropop by numbers. Meddle is a lot better but I prefer the original clattery version to the one that actually made the EP.

Also, lol street team.

Surely I'm not the only person out there who prefers "Meddle" over "Stuck on Repeat"?

fucking thing sucks

I've read people describing her as post nu-rave. fucking POST NU-RAVE. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

Dunno wot it's supposed to mean, but still think "stuck on repeat" is great and can't get into "Meddle" at all. Almost went to see her tonite but got too drunk at Andrew WK and couldn't get friends to go anyways.

Definitely not street team--interviewed her yesterday, and was just curious about what ilm thought.

Side note: Apparently, Atlantic is re-starting Elektra as their "cooler, non-hip hop" arm (what I gathered from the labelspeak of her pub), and she's going to be a centerpiece. Hmmm...

She's quite nice, fwiw.

Meddle one of my favourite songs of last year or whenever I heard it. Stuck on Repeat is a bit of a grower and good, but not as good.

Shame Dead Disco didn't release more stuff, though.

This is Metronomy remix of The Treatment by Dead Disco and what I keep comparing this EP unfavourably against. Overall I thought her voice worked better in a guitar band context anyway, I really liked Dead Disco and am kind of meh on Little Boots.

she is pretty

cover of "day n nite"

Stuck On Repeat is by miles the worst thing I've heard by her - New In Town has been in my head for about three days and Love Kills, erm, kills. I'm actually anticipating the album now.

I found the album disappointingly generic :/

stuck on repeat is like a tolerable version of "can't get you out of my head" - just as catchy but not as annoying. I like the dubstepp-y version of Meddle and the Fake Blood remix of SOR.

is there a single producer left in the uk who hasn't remixed little boots?

'new in town' is pretty good, would be better sung by someone else, but as i've said elsewhere i'm just relieved that there's at least one of these hype overdrive acts that i don't hate

Matt DC's right. Every song that's surfaced since "Stuck on Repeat" has been superior (my favorite being "Mathematics," though its chart prospects are probably low should it ever be released as a single).

Interested in hearing the album so I can evaluate the song with Phil Oakey as a whole rather than just a 30sec clip at Popjustice.

The album would have been better if all the remixers had produced the album - suffers a little from the dead hand of Greg Kurstin, I think.

agree, probably - that's the danger of getting everyone in for the remixes, you hear 'new in town' and think it's pretty good, and then you hear the goldielocks/drop the lime rmxes and it's like BUT THIS IS GREAT AND LOADS BETTER.

Kurstin has definitely been spreading himself thin

can't see LB charting as well as La Roux somehow

Why not? She's a better singer, has better tunes, has more hype behind her, is a bit more indie, and is hotter.

I just had to look up who Greg Kurstin was and my anticipation has just deflated a tad. That Ladyhawke album was my prime example of how to do this sort of thing badly.

La Roux is this year's romofied Kate Nash, whereas LB feels a bit like the Blue Square Kylie/Goldfrapp.

best things Kurstin has done recently = Lily Allen 'The Fear' and 'Kabul Shit' :/

it's a bit of a shame Hesketh went blonde right before first TV appearance /cynic

tbqh I don't think I've liked any of her originals since "Meddle", although I really really really want to hear the Phil Oakey collaboration.

the fred falke remix of new in town is ok but im stunned by how bad the original is

BBC Breakfast yesterday...

dope imo

"i filmed half the album in LA" heh

would pash 09

album leaked...

not getting the love for that Falke remix much

the interview with Popjustice was actually kinda interesting

New in Town sounds like sub-Girls Aloud album filler with a few gristly sounding synth stabs. Poor

it's always troubled me that her website title text isn't "Little Boots" but "Buy new album Hands & gig tickets at the official Little Boots UK website" and that i get 2 emails a week saying pretty much the same thing (along with some actual content, usually lower down)

interesting that despite a hugely aggressive PR push [inc tawdry articles on the sun's website calling her boot-iful and that toe-curling bbc breakfast clip] the single didn't even make the top 10

and yeah the relentless marketing spiel that comes from the boots camp is really offputting. on her recent live gigs she was waffling on about getting radio a-list, plus twittering ppl to buy her single on itunes to put it in the top 10. like who cares? more interested in her songs than that level of apprentice-lite crap

don't think GA haven't really done an electropoppish number this slow tho rockford

NI yeah #13 seems low in the end - 50/50 on whether it will climb like In For The Kill did. but surely most artists use twitter to say 'please buy my single'.

> that toe-curling bbc breakfast clip

that's the kind of thing (along with solo on jools holland and blogging her trip to the stylophone factory) that endears me to her. but then i'm not really her (or probably anyone's) target market.

favourite track on the album - the hidden one (actually the title track) at the end.

> endears me to her

er, her to me.

New In Town is better than any GA single for a good four years, strangely I'm not optimistic about the album.

every pop star on twitter asks people to buy their singles to get into the top 10

said elsewhere that LB has the keri hilson problem, in that 'new in town' sounds like a demo that a talented songwriter would hawk around for other artists to sing. other artists who could make me give a shit about its strong lyrics and hook. as it is i'm just looking at the LB album in itunes and deflating at the idea of listening to it.

Still want to hear the cover band Lidl Boots...

haven't seen many artist-ran twitters that are as chart/sales-obsessed as bootsy. either way it's just one element that makes me feel like i'm being SOLD at constantly. doesn't usually bother me, but there's something so unashamed and rapey about the way boots does it while also trying to seem vaguely alt/independent

i'll take your bet blueski, i'll be stunned if 'new in town' rises in the charts - it has nothing about it at all. there's no genuine 'from the ground-up' buzz about it anywhere, unlike 'in for the kill'

"New in Town" is the worst of her singles so far, and even one of the worst songs on the record. I'm not suprised it's disappointing in the charts.

why? because the charts are full of quality music?

NI i'm not sure what you mean - other than i guess that buzz about LB generally has not transferred to the single itself (i'd be puzzled if it wasn't getting as much if not more R1 support than La Roux's previous and new singles...assuming R1 are loving it all). but most new entries in the charts DO climb right?

From the popjustice interview, its clear that she's absorbed marketing strategy advice, and then instead of filing it away for private thought, she's just blithely added it to the public persona/presentation. I'm reminded of the last US president who would tell general audiences that he'd acquired "political capital, and now he's going to spend it." Usually our public figures have more discretion.

she's demystifying the promotion process maaaan

laying bare the device and shit

^^ wide open for punnage

Popjustice invested pretty heavily in LB so an interview would me far more candid than other places. I doubt a habit will be made of it.

id lay bare... ah you know

The album is good I think, but I see where Stevie is coming from on the dead hand of Greg Kurstin. He's not a very good or interesting producer really. I wish the Petridis review had been correct in it being a cosmic disco influenced album with dubsteppy basslines but it really isn't.

I think she certainly has the tunes to overcome my reservations, but the more generic bits are kind of frustrating - I'm sure she can be more interesting than the watery electropop of things like Mathematics, and her voice is stronger than the diffident sub-Sarah Cracknell coo she defaults to on too many occasions.

pop stars interested in marketing and getting into the charts shock!

kurstin's great and so is this album. lighten up hippies.

Love Kills is tremendous - I don't get why that didn't make the album proper. I also really like the Kate Bush one in the middle whose name escapes me, and the duet with Phil Oakley. She should record her next one with the Juan Maclean or something.

I also really like the Kate Bush one in the middle whose name escapes me

Ghosts, that's it.

She should record her next one with the Juan Maclean or something.

Awesome as this idea is, she could just do it in Joe Hot Chip's flat, Stuck On Repeat is so much better than the other singles (album not out here).

(most (all?) of the album is listenable via myspace as of this week)

album version of this kinda sux in comparison

i like 'click' and another one or two but the album is pretty weak, some real corny toe-curling bits on there

also with the single dropping to #15 this week, interesting that the sun has kept this non-story on their front page for a few days (some lols in the comments)

The album version of Stuck on Repeat sounds better than the original IMO, I think it's the bigger production plus big rumbling noise at the beginning.

I'm a complete convert to this after a few more plays by the way. She really knows her way around a chorus.

if this album was a computer game i'd give it 66%

Can't believe that the Tenori costs £700. I thought it was like a cheap kiddie toy.

Also, all computer games should be scored 7/10. Thought everybody knew that.

tenori-on(s) are closer to £900 these days according to the yamaha website, they blame the exchange rate.

http://tenori-on.yamaha-europe.com/uk/shop/ (£919)

talk about style over substance

album went from #5 to #40 in the charts in the space of one week - seems like a crazy drop, but is this normal in the charts these days?

No. 679 seem such a fuck up of a label.

Amongst its many charms, "Remedy" is turning out to be an industrial-strength earworm. Of the three remixes that I've heard, the astute re-jig by Buffetlibre vs Sidechains is my clear winner.

I have been pleasantly surprised to have had this banging about in my head the past couple of days, too. I'd initially thought it could have benefited from being given to a Bengtzing-esque hoofer, but with time it's really grown on me.

Buffetlibre vs Sidechains remix of "Remedy" + the new Friendly Fires single = the return of BIG DRUMS, hurrah!

'Love Kills' = Moroder/Freddie Mercury cover, no?

The very same. And there's a Buffetlibre/Sidechains remix of that one as well: http://www.buffetlibredjs.net/remixesbl.html

er, just ditto re that remedy remix. love it, love the original. if it gets within sniffing distance of #1 i will expire in a heap

well it went in at #33 and seeing as 'New In Town' didn't climb i doubt this one will (despite performances on breakfast sodding TV)

it's not actually released yet tho!?

Post Field Day, I've decided I have defected to the "YAY!" side over the Little Boots issue.

i didn't notice it charted at the weekend. woah kids, yr so modern with your downloads and that. release dates pffft

it's not actually released yet tho!?

New In Town didn't enter pre-release tho so why would the follow up (not sure if it's had more plugging - maybe) xp

nice video just for ref

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McdqerXrwXE

Post Field Day, I've decided I have defected to the "YAY!" side over the Little Boots issue.

― seni seviyorum / senden nefret ediyorum (Masonic Boom), Wednesday, 5 August 2009 17:10

i don't know what to make of this.

oh wait. she's a girl. i get it now.

WTF are you trying to say, Chuck?

Think the marketing campaign blew it a bit with Little Boots by selling her as Glamorous New Pop Star when they might have had more luck selling her as what she is - geeky, techy, mates-with-Hot-Chip, slightly awkward indie/rave girl gone pop.

A few years ago that would have been commercial suicide but now I'm not so sure. Like VV Brown it's never really felt like there was enough ground-up enthusiasm for her - the marketing success of La Roux lay in leading people to believe they'd discovered them for themselves, even though there was a massive promotional budget. Little Boots was trailered as This Year's Big Thing from the start and the public didn't quite buy it.

FWIW I'm still playing this album and its by miles my favourite of the 2009 All Female Hype Crew.

Think the marketing campaign blew it a bit with Little Boots by selling her as Glamorous New Pop Star when they might have had more luck selling her as what she is - geeky, techy, mates-with-Hot-Chip, slightly awkward indie/rave girl gone pop.

Exactly.

I did't "get" her when people were trying to compare her to Kylie or whatever - I have NEVER seen Kylie play a theremin onstage. I was converted. Wanted more of the geekgurl, TBH.

Will probably get this album now.

Oh wait. I like her. She's doomed. :-(

anyone else think the love kills cover is a deliberate St Etienne impersonation?

ok, i'm not a huge StEt fan, but i don't mean just vocally (just seen Matt mentioning sarah-cracknell up thread)

actually a lot of them sound like 'look i can sounds like X'. i guess i mean like lex said ^^ 'like a demo that a talented songwriter would hawk around for other artists to sing'. but to about half the tracks, not just new in town.

She is one of those artists I have not heard but am somewhat interested in. Sometimes I think, though, that she is too much of a glamour girl to be any good musically.

But I see up thread this is maybe more to do with how she has been marketed. And anyway, she is not a "put it away love" type of glamour girl.

Little Boots was trailered as This Year's Big Thing from the start and the public didn't quite buy it.

i think this is mainly down to her 'weakness' as a singer/performer compared to Duffy or Adele (previous Big Things but totally different acts but sold on a 'real music' ticket that compels a wider audience) really. and yeah she's too "niche" ('Coronation Street in space' is still my favourite description, altho that suggests a more humourous and culturally/regionally stereotypical approach which isn't really there)

I'm only going to accept that criticism from the Lex if he also renounces all the other vocally-limited personality-free ciphers he has repped for over the years - from Rachel Stevens through to Ciara and Cassie.

(All of the above are great BTW but they're still personality free blank canvases)

Think the marketing campaign blew it a bit with Little Boots by selling her as Glamorous New Pop Star when they might have had more luck selling her as what she is - geeky, techy, mates-with-Hot-Chip, slightly awkward indie/rave girl gone pop.

^^^this

i love the album, although the lyrics to New In Town make me want to throw my stereo out the window every time i hear it (the song is ace).

ha, only just seen it was meant as a criticism. it isn't. and I didn't mean it as such!

It occurs to me that there are only two basic ways to market a pop star in the 00s (indie bands like Florence and the Machine don't count here). You either sell them as absolute top of the pedestal gods and goddesses (Justin, Beyonce, Rihanna) or you sell them as recognisable human beings who their fanbase might enjoy going down the pub with (Lily Allen, Winehouse once upon a time, Duffy, maybe even Lady Gaga).

They should have gone for the latter with Little Boots but went for the former and missed. It's no coincidence that the biggest UK pop names of the decade - Sugababes, Leona, some of Girls Aloud, started in one camp and grew into the other over time.

note too that justin/beyoncé/rihanna all spent a substantial amount of time paying their dues before going completely stratospheric - and all first emerged in what seems like a v difft pop era (one where record labels had money, for starters). lady gaga seems to be a special case in that she realises exactly what to project to

you're right about lil boots (tho), the POP STAR marketing seemed off from the start given what we already knew her as (dead disco).

I'm only going to accept that criticism from the Lex if he also renounces all the other vocally-limited personality-free ciphers he has repped for over the years - from Rachel Stevens through to Ciara and Cassie.

ngghhh there is such a difference between being "technically limited vocally" and "personality-free cipher", you're totally missing what i love about ciara and cassie! both have a ton of personality - pretty specific and non-malleable personalities in fact, which is why a) only 10 people care about them b) those 10 people REALLY care about them.

stevens, yeah. her voice is technically fine but NO charisma at all, i haven't listened to come & get it in years. would probably argue that her songs are better than lil boots' (tho).

literally no one i know can figure out how or why la cunt is popular - she is 100% atrocious on every level - while lil boots and fat machine get middling chart positions, and vv brown and mpho flop. oh lol i've just noticed what the two flops have in common and it's not just a semblance of talent :(

oh i didn't finish the lady gaga sentence, osrry am a bit tipsy from the mariah playback. sth abt ostentatiously pretending to be pretentious, image-wise, this ducking the criticism of actual pretentiousness, while secretly being really bog standard substance-wise.

*thus

i miss j-lo btw

Okay if Ciara has a personality it isn't a very interesting one then and it certainly doesn't translate to the music.

It's rather early to say Mpho's flopped, isn't it? One single getting to #48 with not that much bumping, aside from R1 playlist and PopJustice - we're hardly talking the Titanic here.

Actually think Mpho has the potential to put out a better record than all of them, but given that her only single to date was 90% Echo Beach anyway it's a bit early to make any kind of call.

she is 100% atrocious on every level

La Roux really is a huge pile of WHY?! to me. Aside from the perma-sneer, there's the problem of being "influenced" by (ie, blatantly cribbing from) early 80's synth pop. Why not just listen to "Upstairs at Eric's" instead?

The weird thing with Boots is that I kind of much prefer her on piano, like the bonus track or the Youtube version of "Stuck on Repeat", cos you can hear more of her voice, and I do rather like her voice. There's a certain kind of keening to it, a bit of cut on the edges. And I do think she's got personality, too, it's just a bit... dunno if quiet's quite the right word, but something kind of not-fit-in-ny. Winning Sound of 2009 rather than just placing hasn't helped her, though, I'd agree with that - the album doesn't seem quite ready for that level of attention, it sounds more like a starting point for greater things than a fresh-out-the-box poll-slayer (then again, previous Sound Of... winners include The Bravery and Corrinne Bailey-Rae, so, erm). It's created a big, not-especially-defined cloud of hype around her - the expectation being that "SHE WILL BE HUGE"/"SHE WILL BE GREAT" without really explaining it. So the worry is that the stories left to tell about her are that she's failed to BE HUGE, and so therefore she's failed, and so that'll be that, then. Which is a shame, because she's almost certainly got some grand records in her, and I'd rather like her to sing them.

ciara's just a girl who loves to dance and believes in keeping it positive.

saw mpho live the other week & she was actually really quite impressive - not really that quirky unless an indie-girl bob counts, and like santogold she's quite understandably got a chip on her shoulder about being pigeonholed, but otherwise she just played it pretty straight w/her awesome voice. her cover of 'running up that hill' brought the house down.

the lil boots/keri hilson parallels continue in that the current story around boots is similar to the narrative when hilson's first few singles flopped and her album kept getting pushed back - really shows up the industry differences (tho), in that the hilson strategy of just throwing stuff at the radio until 'turnin me on' stuck, and THEN releasing the album, couldn't work here. or could it? why the need to hype boots as BESTEST BIGGEST POP! STAR! before anything was properly released? as desperate as hilson seemed last year, she's bona fide now - and over here too - and while i prefer her to boots b/c she's generically catchy in a genre i love, i can't see how boots brings any less to her particular table.

and history kinda shows that you can't throw someone like boots straight in at the top of the charts - goldfrapp, who are pretty much the template for this aesthetic, only had their commercial breakthrough with their third album.

maybe it's because little boots is such a fucking stupid name (tho), every time i typed "boots" in the above para i cringed inside.

she's still selling a hell of a lot more than poor róisín murphy :(

Worth pointing out though that her big hits over here are "Knock You Down" (ft. Kanye & Ne-Yo) and "Return The Favour" (ft. Timbaland). And the telly ads for her album have it prefaced with "TIMBALAND PRESENTS". And "Turnin' Me On" had Lil Wayne on it, and that feller has managed to propel Jay sodding Sean into the US top 40 (and hell, I quite liked "Ride It" back in the day).

Little Boots' guest appearances so far: Phil Oakey. This is Not Quite The Same Thing.

Also, I think the UK pop calendar is very... seasonal. Sort of. Cos December, traditionally, is WHO IS CHRISTMAS NUMBER ONE month, albeit that's now become WHO IS X-FACTOR month. January is traditionally WHO IS NEW month - a 'quiet time' for releases, enabling things that wouldn't chart so high in the summer to go high, albeit that with the demise of the physical single this isn't such a big thing anymore. It's... I dunno, it's what happens, isn't it? The BBC, the NME, the this, the that, the other - January is when the music listener is told what shall be unleashed over the next 12 months, what has been quietly simmering on the back-burner for the past year to be brandished beneath their nostrils. It's become the nature of the beast, and it is sort of weird, yes. It's in keeping with the music scene in the UK, though - we're all very informed consumers, and we like to stay in the loop.

(the sentences about this are bouncing about in my head, but I can't put them into order - how very VV Brown...)

the seasonality of it all feels a bit...artificial now, though, doesn't it? maybe the industry should start moving away from it.

lil' wayne couldn't propel electrik red anywhere :(

point taken about hilson's cohorts, but still: including her songwriting rep, playing the long promo game worked for her, rather than trying to go with any "OMG NEW RIHANNA MEGASTAR" hype. with the best will in the world, you couldn't sell keri as that. she's a talented pro who'll be able to come up with good-to-great radio jams on a reliably regular basis but any attempt to label her as "the saviour of pop" or "the saviour of r&b" would've been laughable. and with the best will in the world, i can't quite see why anyone thought that line of marketing would have suited lil boots, whose talents, such as they are, are pretty similar.

ok who the fuck is mpho?

http://www.myspace.com/mphosounds

Piano cover of Running Up That Hill is seriously good.

comparing LB with anyone American is kinda pointless i think. for one thing there's a stronger lineage there of solo muse pop girls. UK hasn't actually been very good at developing these (commercially) with only a couple of exceptions (e.g. Ellis-Bextor, but she started in a group and still only moderate success really), and not strictly at a young audience.

success of La Roux is challenging most of my preconceptions about these issues tho (which would be great if she/they were actually good)

[small nervous voice] I *like* La Roux! [/small nervous voice]

(And so do a lot of people that I know offline, the broad consensus being "It *shouldn't* work... but it does.")

'90% Echo Beach anyway'

oh that was mpho. I like.

some laroux is ok. The person less so. No problem there

Little Boots + Gary Numan = NuBoots

http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/events/hub/artists/nuboots.shtml

lovely slow version of 'are "friends" electric?'. they also do venus in furs.

Not available in your area

ok, i was fully prepared to utterly hate that but really...

IT IS COMPLETELY MADE OF AWESOME

everything i find out about little boots makes me like her more and more

Did she really build her own laser harp?

i heard that & it just made me go <3 <3 <3 if she did, then i totally wanna marry her

last i saw re laser harp was her asking someone else to help her build one. that was part 1 of the video.

part 2 has just been posted, am watching it now...

boots soldering
http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/boots1.jpg

working prototype
http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/boots2.jpg

it does still look like something someone has knocked up in their shed, because it was. still the electronics are there.

omg girls soldering = just about the hottest thing i've ever seen in my life

jean-michelle jarre's just looks better coz the lasers come out in a fan, which is more aesthetically pleasing but probably harder to build

Solder is pretty hot, yeah.

i can think of hotter

little boots. soldering. on a desert island. a volcanic desert island. during a heat wave

Slathered in gravy.

now now, we wouldn't want to objectify the highly talented young songwriter, would we?

those do come out in a fan, albeit one with only a few spokes. and they aren't frickin lasers as far as i can tell, just bright lights with gels on them to change the colours (but that also makes them dimmer, as does the smoke). the sounds it generates are ok although we didn't get to hear anything approaching a tune.

jarre's only appears to have 9 beams: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_harp

why 9? surely it should be either 8 or 12 to be sufficient for an octave's worth of notes? unless jarre is playing some odd nonagonic scale i'm not familiar with

laser harps tend to come in two forms - one where which beam you break determines the note and one where the position of the hand determines the note (more like a theremin than a harp really).

(although why you'd need more than two beams for the latter style is beyond me. unless different beams trigger different instruments, or different ranges of notes.)

the guy who invented Jarre's laser harp (and also Carl Craig's fave ever album) emailed me once after I'd mentioned it online to say "The future is already now, of course... And the laser harp, this visual lure just good enough for JMJ, who cares ?", so watch out.

film of the collaboration with gary numan is playing behind the red button on bbc1 tonight (45 minutes, interspersed with la rue and heaven 17). the version of 'are "friends" electric' is stunning. victoria's obviously loving the whole thing. numan's currently reading the stuck on repeat lyrics from a piece of paper...

laser harp parts 3 and 4 were disappointing.

Just discovered Little Boots through looking at electropop singles lists from previous years at RYM. Sounds really great.

Stuck on Repeat was a great single but the album is quite dull. I remember thinking she was going to be in the same league as Annie or Robyn but she really isn't.

Not even Phill Oakey could make the album exciting.

Yeah she really underachieved. She has cancelled a lot of gigs lately, which I'm guessing at tickets not selling. It's a real shame as she has good songs, seems a nice person but clearly not cut out for the kind of BIG POP career role her label tried to cram her into. (Terrible memories of her being sat on some breakfast TV show, playing her tenori-thing while the hosts sniggered at her).

I thought the album did pretty well overall, in the end?

She should have gone further down the Hot Chip with added cosmic disco path that the first couple of singles suggested. I found the album very enjoyable and quite sweet in its way but not exactly bursting with character a lot of the time. Better than anything Annie has churned out in several years, mind.

I'm really surprised they didn't put out Stuck On Repeat again after the album came out. I think if a re-release of that had followed Remedy she would have quite a bit more success.

The album sounded really flat but I hope she can do something else a bit more interesting if she gets a second album, as you say she seemed really nice. She had a lot of potential and I would still would rather listen to her album over the La Roux one anyday.

I was under the impression her album sales were less than expected? Considering all the ads and posters - never seen as much for any other new act before - only reaching the top 5 must have been a disappointment for her label.

Totally agree about Stuck On Repeat - would have been a great ballsy move to put out something so great and different sounding to everything else out there. Rather than sticking her with bigname US producers who didn't really suit what she was about.

Her and Annie are quite similar really, in that neither really followed up on their brilliant first few tracks but I have more time for Annie in that her low sales weren't quite as screamingly visible as Little Boots. Both Annie's last album (her debut is still a classic) and LB's debut suffer from a handful of ok songs and a lot of filler though. It'll be interesting to see what they do next, isn't Annie working with Xenomania?

never seen as much for any other new act before

really? not even Adele, Duffy, Ellie Goulding and others who actually got instant top 3 hits by being more MOR/less electronic? can't say i had that experience.

SOR (not really that different to anything else out there just a better version of it) wouldn't have been a hit/done as well as Earthquake but also Kurstin and RedOne ended up suiting her as much as anyone really esp. the latter - Remedy remains one of his better productions and I'm glad it was an actual hit.

Annie worked with Xenomania extensively for Don't Stop but some of the tracks got canned by the time that album eventually came out. I still rate it a bit above Hands tho.

What else in the charts last year sounded like Stuck On Repeat?

Adele & Duffy are much more 'straight pop' (as opposed to coming from the clubby electro scene), geared towards mums and everymans so if they had as big a promotional campaign it wasn't as notable to me as LB's.

Kurstin/RedOne gave LB a more Americanised R&B sound, watered down her strident Moroder sound and made her sound like a really weedy Lady Gaga - which didn't suit LB at all. Remedy wasn't bad - would probably have been better done by a dozen other acts - but New In Town was awful, as were most of the Kurstin tracks.

more time for Annie in that her low sales weren't quite as screamingly visible as Little Boots

25 Annie Chewing Gum Single Sep 2004

13 Little Boots New In Town Single Jun 2009
5 Little Boots Hands Album Jun 2009 Notes
6 Little Boots Remedy Single Aug 2009
25 Little Boots Hands (re-entrry) Album Aug 2009 Notes

That'll be why...

When the album stiffed (at least compared to high expectations) someone from a label who tried and failed to sign her sneeringly called her Lead Boots. Hell hath no schadenfreude like an A&R man spurned.

xpost Yeah I phrased that badly, I meant more that Annie wasn't being pegged as the new chart-popping sensation in our lives (ie. she wasn't on the front cover of the Guardian magazine, voted BBC Sound of 2009 etc) so her failure to go massive wasn't as shocking as LB's. I'm more thinking about Anniemal in 2004/5 as that album did seem like it'd go massive, by the time of Don't Stop it was kinda obvious she'd always be a cult pop act.

The weird thing I've noticed lately is that I'd still listen to Annie (seeing her as a kind of admirable failure) but with Little Boots it's more of an embarrassed can't-look-her-in-the-eye type feeling and I'd very rarely play her songs these days.

I feel kind of sorry for Little Boots now. She seemed like probably the least objectionable of 2009's femmelectro crop (not too difficult compared to La Roux and Florence).

my theory is that LB's career is basically a victim of that weird mentality of treating Pop as something w/a capital letter - that romanticised hankering for a Pop Star to be someone fabulous and ridiculous and omg, this will change your life!!!111

Yeah she was clearly ill-at-ease in that role, but she's done well enough for them to give her a second album, be interesting to see what she does with it as she's got more potential than any of last year's fashionable 'women' things.

she seemed to have gotten herself plugged into that weird cycle where everything seems dependent on playing the industry game, achieving certain chart positions too - pop fans tend to obsess over that side of things rather than the music, but focusing on that was never gonna pan out for little boots. as matt dc says she's essentially the solo female hot chip, and when you think about the idea of marketing hot chip from the off as Pop Stars who should be reaching no 1 and playing that game, then you see how ludicrous LB's positioning was.

Yeah she was clearly ill-at-ease in that role

it's not just whether she fit into that though, it's that the role itself is bullshit and no debut act should ever be marketed in that way - pop stars never start off in their imperial phase, and trying to manufacture one just doesn't cut it.

I think it was more that at that time there was a multitude of new "Female Pop" acts, (Gaga, Laroux, Machine), and a large number of them since (Marina, Goulding, etc), that she's got trampled in the rush.

"Remedy" got as much play as "Pokerface" at the time, but one had a bunch more similar to come, and the other, um, didn't. (It pays to increase your headcount)

lex OTM. It's the curse of the BBC Sound Of poll. Once you've topped that, like it or not, if you don't storm the charts you look like a failure. But the label played into that. The Estonian-Eurovision-entry awesomeness of Remedy notwithstanding, I thought it was a bad move to bring in Greg Kurstin and make everything sound so desperately pop when Stuck on Repeat seemed like a much more rewarding path. Difference between her and Hot Chip being looks, basically - nobody was going to package Alexis Taylor as the latest pop star. You could see LB trying really hard to establish her synth-geek credentials - "Look, I built this fucking instrument myself" - when most people were taking her for just a pretty face with some clever, quiet dude lurking in the background pressing the buttons.

I think she over-excited the press based on image - BBC SOund Of didn't help this as that's usually reserved for the acts the industry really throw weight behind (Adele, Duffy, Ellie...who must have all won some sort of Britskool-ran lottery or something).

but how is Lady Gaga not the epitomy of 'Pop as something w/a capital letter - that romanticised hankering for a Pop Star to be someone fabulous and ridiculous and omg, this will change your life!!!111' and she entered Imperial Phase within her first year. That's money tho.

Yeah, that's what I meant by "Headcount"

idk what you mean by headcount

lady gaga kinda proves my point in that she very obviously grew into that role - very rapidly, but it's fundamentally about allowing people to make up their own minds about you

Lady Gaga really appeals to people who grew up in the 80s and had a hankering for that big larger-than-life event-video Adam Ant style pop star though, and that was always due to make a comeback at some point.

Has Ellie Goulding been selling that well? I have no idea, she seems really easy to just overlook.

There's some mad hairsplitting going on here though given that Gaga was completely ubiquitous and rammed right down everyone's throats from day one. Much more than Little Boots or anyone else being discussed here. The difference is she suited the role.

Lady Gaga had more potential hits, more money, more ambition, more style - just more. She was a mainstream-ready personality from the get go. Little Boots is more in the lineage of, as people have said, Annie or Saint Etienne or any number of acts doing pop from a hipster/underground/indie angle. There's something about that aesthetic which is a tough sell, though not an impossible one.

That whole female pop thing was such a media/industry construct. Listeners didn't treat it as a genre or movement; you never heard any actual people saying "yeah, I'm really into all the new female electro acts". More often than not, it was about individual artists or stand-alone tracks. So yeah, I'd agree it was a case of a lot of deserving artists got drowned out over less deserving and overhyped ones.

i don't think lady gaga is that relevant to this discussion though.

Gaga had instant success - so it seems many people had made their minds up about her instantly.

I never felt like LB was being really pushed at me more than SEB or whoever. at least the daytime TV appearances seemed to work in getting her a top 10 hit. i was surprised at how much exposure she got tho (starting with BBC Sound Of altho I can't remember who I expected to win that - not La Roux as I didn't think they'd cross over so well) as i never thought she'd do that well based on the music.

One thing that never came up, and maybe it's not an issue at all, is that LB didn't really dance in her videos. If you're a solo female act performing dancey pop tunes I can imagine the label having some reservations about this unfortunately.

How did Ladyhawke fair in all of this? Being the other dorky/aspie one of the lot, that is?

Ladyhawke did quite well in the end but the buzz was a lot slower and more ground-up.

The sad thing is that I remember in her (premature) Guardian Weekend piece she was worried about getting too much attention too soon. And rightly so. The Ladyhawke route would have suited her much better.

but then she would only have sold as many records as Ladyhawke

She's a lot better than Ladyhawke though.

The above quote that she 'didn't fit the role' really rings true. She was never going to be a globe-stomping tabloid-friendly pop star and it was a mistake to shove her into the quick-returns industry cycle - has anyone other than Lady Gaga in the dancey-poppy field succeeded at this in the past few years?

I'm seeing a lot of parallels with the way Hurts are being marketed - thread here: Hurts - in that it feels very forced and micro-managed (heard some interesting tales from journalists/prs/agents who've dealt with their ultra heavy-handed team). It seems the Hurts blokes are more suited for mainstream fame than LB ever was but hitting only #50 with the first single proper suggests they're not connecting with the general pop-buying public.

No-one likes to have that feeling of being force-fed.

still haven't heard a note of Hurts

xpost Yeah I phrased that badly, I meant more that Annie wasn't being pegged as the new chart-popping sensation in our lives (ie. she wasn't on the front cover of the Guardian magazine, voted BBC Sound of 2009 etc) so her failure to go massive wasn't as shocking as LB's. I'm more thinking about Anniemal in 2004/5 as that album did seem like it'd go massive, by the time of Don't Stop it was kinda obvious she'd always be a cult pop act.

I guess the Erot connection gives Annie some kind of "indie credibility" in some small but loud circles that other electropop acts cannot quite match.

She was never going to be a globe-stomping tabloid-friendly pop star and it was a mistake to shove her into the quick-returns industry cycle - has anyone other than Lady Gaga in the dancey-poppy field succeeded at this in the past few years?

In terms of big commercial success, I would say La Roux have suceeded quite well. Surely not in the same league as Lady Gaga, but still a handfull of very big hits, that even crossed over to a rather huge number of markets rather than staying in the UK market doing little outside the UK.

Regarding the supposed failure, the UK chart performance of the three singles from Little Boots' first album was rather similar to the three singles from "Speak & Spell". Did Depeche Mode fail?

Those were different times, old pip.

I don't think you can compare someone who has released one album in today's marketplace after a truckload of hype with a band who released their first album two and a half decades ago and subsequently went on to sell millions of records. That's ridiculous.

Still utterly baffled by the success of La Roux.

Have they 'succeeded' where LB failed?

Hmmm...

2 La Roux In For The Kill Single Mar 2009
1 La Roux Bulletproof Single Jul 2009
2 La Roux La Roux Album Jul 2009 Notes
27 La Roux I'm Not Your Toy Single Oct 2009
19 La Roux La Roux (re-entry) Album Jan 2010
28 La Roux In For The Kill (re-emergence) Single Jan 2010

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsX4FPFBgFk

Someone at work is off to see Ladyhawke tonight. This whole electro-girl songwriter craze feels like a very long time ago indeed, but I'm glad the artists involved haven't been completely dropped.

Yeah, that song does sound a bit quaint.

I really like that song.

About time to get them back. This anthemic stadium dance thing courtesy of David Guetta, Swedish House Mafia etc. is a bit wearing in the long run. Longing to see new stuff from Little Boots and La Roux instead.

New album streaming http://pitchfork.com/advance/82-nocturnes/

holy SHIT this is amazing

Not really sure about this tbh, feels kinda lacking in personality, both in vocal and production terms. And I liked big sections of the first album.

i'm liking a fair amount of this

I'm in shock at how good this is. It's so much better than the first album.

Beat Beat needs to be put out as a single right now!

It's quite good! Just been listening to it here this hour which given the Slayer news has been more than a little incongruous.

Thought this was sounded like a bunch of fourth singles from a late Kylie album. Except Crescendo, which is so good it shows how average the rest is.

That's exactly what it sounds like, that or really watered down Saint Etienne copyists. The anonymuity of the production doesn't help - this Tensnake remix of one of the tracks is so much better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tofjr7L3h9Q

Also is this slipping out with zero publicity entirely? Feels like the music industry just gave up on her.

Considering it's produced by Tim Goldsworthy, James Ford and Andy Butler it sounds shockingly anonymous, and the lyrics are dreck. Maybe Joe Goddard wasn't returning her calls. It's a shame because after the perceived disappointment of the debut (even though it went gold) she needed to kill it this time around and this just isn't going to save her.

Also is this slipping out with zero publicity entirely?

i feel like i've seen more people checking for (as in, going to listen to) this album than i really should have done, considering. i'll probably check it out at some point but idk why it made a lot of people drop what they were doing for it

I think there was a general feeling of unresolved potential there, she's obviously got good taste and I did see rumours that she was working with Joe Goddard and Tensnake and there was this vague feeling that she might end up doing something really exciting but that hasn't really happened.

Why isn't "Headphones" on this? It should be.

all the singles since the 1st album have been great i thought, but no Headphones? that's weird.

yeah i like pretty much all of this now. good record.

'strangers' is pretty clumsy and the clear weak link, 'beat beat' is massive and probably should be a single

679 didn't want to release the finished record but allowed her to release it on her own label, hence no Headphones-

I thought Headphones was always meant to be a standalone single? Seems like I read something to that effect when it popped up.

As per above comments, I kinda wish she found a producer soulmate and established a less anonymous identity. The MNDR album last year did this sort of thing better.

I played this again and really enjoyed it pretty much all the way through. I really like how it flows. It's a shame it's not going to sell at all. This kind of sounds like the album I thought she'd make when I first heard the full version of Stuck On Repeat back in 2008. A lot of the stuff she tried on Hands just didn't suit her that much, Remedy gave her an actual hit single but you could tell it wasn't her style.

I never understood why she did an edit of Stuck on Repeat for the album and didn't put it out as a proper single? She answers that in this interview.

http://thefourohfive.com/news/article/i-know-who-i-am-and-where-i-am-at-now-the-405-meets-little-boots

I actually really like this album.

liking this, reminds me some of that kathy diamond album a few yrs back. i can see this being great for the summer

yeah i get its flaws, but i just dig the album's sound, house stuff is gonna always do it for me

Seems like she needs to have a bit of space and do her own thing without any pressures. Hopefully she hasn’t burnt herself out by the whole major-label thing.

is there a remix disc or w/e of this planned? i feel like there should be

damn this shd have more than 595 views https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuCLJLDHQJk

little boots has quietly been making very good music for the past 5 years

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sQzEib6hOA

I totally missed this new EP but it is characteristically brilliant. I think about her and Charli XCX in similar terms - why are people so suspicious of artists who openly admit they want to make great pop music?

in her case probably because her first go-round wasn't great (I still like "Remedy" though) and lost among La Roux/v1 Lady Gaga/etc; also it doesn't help that there's really no solid place in the music press right now for this kind of thing except, like, Popjustice

("well why didn't you pitch it" because I totally missed it)

I enjoyed the first album a lot at the time and was completely underwhelmed by the follow-up. Played the debut a month ago and it was sounding like it came from a completely different pop universe to now, like the idea that anyone would try and pitch those songs as mainstream concern seems totally alien in a world of straight-down-the-line maximalist Zara Larsson bangers.

the follow-up was uneven but the first four tracks are completely unfuckwithable (really, it should have been an EP)

yeah "Motorway" is probably the greatest thing she's ever done give or take "Stuck On Repeat"

I love this video for Eros though, it's such a simple concept but it looks incredible

The second album is my favourite. Still love “Every Night I Say a Prayer@.

Yeah, I love that second album. One of my favourite albums of the decade. Working Girl was crazy underrated too. Both much stronger and more consistent than Hands.