Officially the UK’s biggest hope for 2009 gets a proper single out…

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Fergal O’Reilly: The great hope of Wonky Pop (defined by Wikipedia as “a penis that engorged in 2008 dedicated to showing the world ‘Rudebox is not a four letter word’”) finally releases a single and it turns out it’s a bolshier, more expensive sounding version of 2004’s Annie. It’s a poignant comparison because despite Boots’ jaunty lyrical embrace of her relative poverty, the song will probably do quite well and haunt Ms Bergstrand as she plaintively hawks demos of her unreleased second album in provincial shopping centres. It also craftily benefits in the current climate by sheer dint of not! being! La! Roux! Excellent work all round.
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David Raposa: The songs that got Little Boots the photo ops w/ Kanye & P-Hillz aren’t bad by any measure, though they are a little fussy and more than a bit beholden to St. Etienne’s electro-smooth glide, especially in the vocal department. For “New In Town,” she begins with some stop-start synth stabs, adds a beat that keeps things nice and simple on the boom-bip tip, and rocks the chorus with a fervor that’s quite different from the icy faux-Cracknell facade she’s offered on other tunes. I don’t know if you can call the debut track from a debut album a “game changer,” but it’s definitely a change of pace, and a most welcome one.
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Martin Skidmore: Keyboardist out of Dead Disco gone solo. I like this: she can sing, the electro instrumentation is complex and interesting, and it made me want to dance, and I was singing along with the chorus halfway through the first play. She’s worked with Hot Chip, and it is a little like them, but with good vocals. She could be a real star, I think.
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Keane Tzong: This is our great Pop Savior for 2009? Don’t get me wrong, I like Vic Hesketh fine and I think this is a perfectly serviceable, even pretty good pop tune. And yet, somehow, I am disappointed. Blame the hype cycle. Blame Little Boots for presenting a merely “decent-to-good” pop song to us for a debut single, and then kneecapping even that with a middle 8 that sounds spliced in from another, far worse, song. This is not going to pave the path to the stardom for which we have already groomed her. It is worth saying, though, that the instrumental is amazing: it’s got charm for days. Shame about the vocal.
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Iain Mew: “What do you think so far? Is it all you’re hoping for? Does it live up to your every dream?” Expectations! Fair to say that Little Boots is aware of them. “New in Town” sounds unlikely to be anyone’s new favourite song, but, while it initially comes off as rather throwaway, especially those offhand vocals, it’s also instantly likeable and full of neat little touches that reveal themselves over a few listens. Just to confound, it’s also bookended by two startling instrumental bits that are more inventive and exciting than the whole of the intervening 2:30. Hmm.
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Briony Edwards: The stoppy-starty intro is aggrevating to a hangover, and I can’t help but feel that Peaches Geldof will be going mad for this single. That aside, the song’s nice and all, it has a lovely sound (think The Knife), and it is very well excecuted (you can tell she has genuine talent as opposed to someone pissing around on a keyboard). However, it just misses the place where it goes from “a nice song” to a notable achievement. This is possibly due, in large part, to the fact that it sounds like it could have been made by any one of the UK’s recent emergence of young female electro artists in the last year. A flurry of good elements that somehow just don’t really come together to grab your attention.
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Tom Ewing: Little Boots has been making faux-primitive electropop for, erm, at least a whole year, so it must be a bit galling for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to sweep in and do her entire ‘thing’ with so much more drama and danger and general hotness. Mind you, she can’t be alone in that. I liked “Stuck On Repeat” a lot but I’ve never liked the Little Boots name: it’s got a cosy, unambitious ring to it. And in this case that’s all too apt. Goodwill gets her through, but only just.
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Edward Okulicz: This sounds enormous – the start-stop squelching of the opening instrumental bit and the incredibly unsubtle (and all the better for it) beats especially – and it’s a bit of a tune to boot. I’m not entirely convinced that the lady herself has a voice big enough to sell it completely but the gusto and hooks are certainly there, and that adds up to a quality slice of decadent, dense electropop.
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Martin Kavka: Greg Kurstin is proving himself to be one of the most formidable songwriters of this decade. This chorus has perhaps the strongest hook in pop since “Since U Been Gone”. In addition, the song as a whole is remarkably canny. Its electro touches aren’t invoked because of some unacknowledged imperative to be electro in 2009; rather, the strangeness of electro meshes with Little Boots’ identity as an unreliable narrator (she’ll show the new-in-town boy a real good time, but she also warns him not to rely on people he meets), and is perfectly in sync with the mix of alienation and comfort found in the contemporary urban cityscape. Form meets function in this genre for once. Now, if only Little Boots had a better voice…
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Doug Robertson: I want to like this a lot more than I actually do. On paper, this ticks all the right boxes, and even picking out all the separate elements of the track shows that this has all the right ingredients to make me go all wobbly, but it somehow manages to be a lot less than the sum of its parts. It all just seems a little too calculated and derived. And while I have no problem with a track giving off an air of studied disinterest, actual disinterest is a lot harder to love.
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Ian Mathers: That massive ascending synth riff that lifts the beginning of “New in Town” is so awesome that when it recedes into the background for the chorus, it’s initially a disappointment. In fact, it’s basically hidden for the second half of the song, which took me some time to get over. If the rest of the song wasn’t so great (especially because it’s about being poor and hitting the town anyway, a situation I sympathize with right now), “New in Town” would count as a massive waste of potential. As it is, I await the remix that fully realizes the power of its opening section.
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Hillary Brown: Not hugely the next big thing, at least at first listen, but this tune has a heartbeat that hooks you into repeated listens, even if you don’t like twitchy, pitchy stuff.
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