The lineup: Victoria Hesketh (vocals).
The background: It's not just rock music that's got one eye on the past, recycling old riffs or using it for inspiration to create something new. There are landmark tracks in dance music, too, that DJs or producers find it hard to get over; for every Get It On and I Feel Love. The oscillating pulse that throbbed throughout the first single by Hesketh alias Little Boots, Stuck On Repeat, was so redolent of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's 1977 sonic breakthrough it made Oasis look, well, original. It was still good, though - somehow a formerly futuristic sequencer pulse sounds better, less in hock to the past, than a hoary guitar riff to these ears. Anyway, the latest release by the girl being hailed in some parts as this year's disco queen, Meddle - actually her debut single proper because Stuck On Repeat was a white-label club release only - doesn't use a stock electronic rhythm as the basis for her vocal flights. It's more of a song, with a jerky beat that's a bit Timbaland, only with the tacky hookiness of a trash hit like Mickey by Toni Basil. The lyric is what really sticks, though, one of those man-bashing, I-will-survive affairs that certain people - gay men, women - feel an affinity for, despite or maybe because of its trite observations (something about being a "mixed-up girl in a mixed-up world") about L.U.V. It's TK Maxx techno, basically, but, like the work of Xenomania and Richard X, confirms suburban Britain's penchant for metallic electronica and is ideally suited to handbag house-congregating at your local danceteria, notwithstanding the bit in the middle that sounds like a Gregorian chant.
And, like Stuck On Repeat, it's been produced by Hot Chip's Joe Goddard, one of those brainy types with the common touch. Weirdly, Greg Kurstin of US jazz-pop group The Bird and the Bee is lined up to produce the debut album by Little Boots, a part-time DJ and former member of sometime Fierce Panda electroclash-ers Dead Disco who shares a nickname with Caligula (the third ruler of the Roman Empire, debauched despot fans). That makes a sort of sense: Hesketh's vocals are way upfront in the mix, and she has a clear, plummy way of enunciating that should appeal to the "wow, amazin' voice!" brigade (one of her songs, Hands, is a piano ballad), although on a track like Magic she veers more towards the blank, glassy, sighing approach to non-singing favoured by Kylie. At the moment, she's big in the blogosphere and performing in hipster London dives like 93 Feet East and Hoxton Bar & Kitchen, but she's doing a DJ set at Glastonbury on the BBC Introducing Stage and there's an appearance to follow at Creamfields in Liverpool, so with a cross of the fingers she'll cross over faster than you can sashay across the dancefloor like Travolta in a white suit.
The buzz: "Beautiful and thrilling."
The truth: She's a future-disco diva, but her ballad-pop roots are showing.
Most likely to: Do a Robyn
Least likely to: Be turned into a bootleg with Pink Floyd's Meddle. Although now that we mention it...
What to buy: Meddle is released by 50 Bones on August 4.
File next to: Goldfrapp, Donna Summer, Sugababes, Robyn.
Links: www.myspace.com/littlebootsmusic
Tomorrow's new band: Tinchy Stryder.
See Also
