Little Boots - "Stuck on Repeat"

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