Little Boots - "Stuck on Repeat"

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