"Pop" is easy to write and even easier to say, but it's not so easy to pull off successfully. Victoria "Little Boots" Hesketh has been outspoken in embracing the term. "A pop song is just this three-and-a-half-minute nugget, but it can be so powerful," the synth-toting songstress from Blackpool, England, told Carson Daly the night of her first L.A. show. "My problem with a lot of mainstream pop artists-- I love the songs, and I think they're great songs a lot of the time, but they don't have enough character for me."
A musician since childhood, Hesketh once got rejected in the opening rounds of the UK's "Pop Idol". She went on to play in a jazz trio, a big band, and, by 2005, a punk-charged synth group called Dead Disco. That's around when L.A. session mainstay Greg Kurstin (one half of jazzy electropop duo the Bird and the Bee; previously of 1990s one-hit wonders Geggy Tah) started prodding Hesketh to focus on writing pop songs. From there, it's almost too good to be true: One minute she's covering Human League on YouTube in her pajamas, the next she's partying with Kanye West and Brandon Flowers. If you're a former "TRL" host, that's a refreshing do-it-yourself tale. If you're a more skeptical sort, you check the price tag of the Japanese electronic instrument she has helped publicize, and you wonder.
Little Boots' debut album, then, is a mainstream pop effort with an indie-friendly narrative. It's a savvy approach, effectively bridging the gap between poptimism and alt snobbery. One three-and-a-half-minute nugget comes after another, with the directness of Madonna and the fashion sense, too: There's blog-house distortion, Italo-disco sweep, and the dayglo tranceyness of recent electronic-based pop-rap hits. The hooks, however, tend to be more Hard Candy than The Immaculate Collection. I really like one song, and I think they're decent enough songs a lot of the time, but all too often Hands is as lacking in character as the music Hesketh criticizes.
Hands' most distinguishing characteristic is an unusual level of meta-pop self-awareness. Kind of clever the first time: "Stuck on Repeat", produced by Hot Chip's Joe Goddard and co-written with Goddard and Kurstin, still throbs like a Kylie Minogue crush. But then there's latest single "New in Town", a glammy going-out song that also doubles as an artist introduction-- she wants to take us out tonight, and she wants to make us feel all right, but staying in sounds good, too. On "Remedy", producer/co-writer RedOne (Akon, Lady Gaga) lends generic club-rap swagger but can't convince that this "music is the cure"; bittersweet soft-rocker "Tune Into My Heart", co-written with accomplished Belgian producer/songwriter Pascal Gabriel (New Order's "Regret", Dido), asks what's the frequency and never quite finds its signal.
Even the songs that aren't commenting on themselves lyrically sound like they're commenting on themselves musically. Despite radio-ready production and commercial hooks that tell us we're hearing pop, it can take some hours of intense listening before most of these tunes ever stick in the head, and there's little to no emotional investment. "Symmetry" has the Human League's Phil Oakey, and "Mathematics" has a metaphor inspired by Sylvia Plath's "Love Is a Parallax", but their by-the-numbers synth-pop is more science than art. "I'm like a moth into the flame," Hesketh coos on "Hearts Collide", a sultry Minogue-vogue spacewalk. We all have someone we like with trite lyrics or an average voice, but what makes the best pop songs successful is that they have some quality uniquely their own, and that's mostly absent here.
Paradoxically, Hands works best as pop when Hesketh taps indie-famous collaborators. The second-best song is also the second single, "Meddle", where the production and songwriting team from "Stuck on Repeat" turn toward rock's angst and propulsion. Simian Mobile Disco's Jas Shaw lends his skills to a pair of solid if lyrically dismal tracks: the spacious "Click" ("I thought you were a condition/ That no one else could treat") and the pattering "Ghosts", which has a deftly pirouetting melody that helps make it one of the only songs here that doesn't sound like Hesketh is trying to be someone else, someone more mundane.
A few years ago, I wrote a column suggesting that the ideal pop star of today is someone like Robyn: polished chart-pop sound, still writes her own songs. Then along came Lily Allen. Now even in country, a genre not traditionally given to valuing singer/songwriters, you find people praising Taylor Swift because she writes her own songs and records for an "indie" label. So Little Boots, with her unabashed love of pop and her honest-to-goodness instrumental ability-- check the piano-driven hidden track-- has the right package for the current moment, and if Lady Gaga and La Roux can click with the public, maybe she will, too. Then again, calling yourself pop isn't guaranteed to bring you popularity. Songs don't get stuck on repeat unless people can't get them out of their heads.
