Little Boots - "Stuck on Repeat"

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.

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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.