FEATURE:
Second Spin
Little Boots - Working Girl
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AS a fan of…
the Blackpool-born Little Boots (Victoria Hesketh), I really like her three studio albums to date. I think that we will get a fourth soon enough. Her 2009 debut, Hands, is remarkable. As is 2013’s Nocturnes. In terms of critical acclaim it is her third, 2015’s Working Girl, that divided some critics. I am going to bring in a positive review alongside a more mixed one. Despite the fact there are a fair few producers on Working Girl, the writing, vocals from Little Boots and the overall sound is brilliant. It might be my favourite album of hers. One can feel a real sense of shift and evolution from her debut album to where she was on Working Girl. With strong tracks like Working Girl and No Pressure making sure the album gets off to a flying start, there are not that many dips in terms of quality. Maybe the second half is a little less strong than the first – though both are pretty balanced and have some really good songs on them. There is not a lot of biographical information regarding the themes of the album and the background. Instead, I found a 2015 interview from SPIN, where Little Boots spoke about the album. She explains how, on Working Girl, she sort of came full circle:
“For years, Little Boots has chased total independence. Following a stifling creative relationship with her record label (they wanted the British Lady Gaga, she didn’t), the U.K. singer abandoned her deal with Atlantic Records midway through the making of her second LP, 2013’s Nocturnes. Now, Little Boots controls her own image and output — a perk of forming her own label, On Repeat Records, on which she’ll release her upcoming third album, Working Girl (in conjunction with Dim Mak in North America).
“I kind of got that feeling back like when you first start out,” she says over the phone from London. “I’ve come full circle and there’s no boundaries or rules I can break. It’s quite exciting and liberating.”
Born Victoria Hesketh, Little Boots has released two full length albums, both of which presented boundary-pushing ideas of what modern pop and dance music could be. Hands, released in 2009, preceded the wave of festival-tent EDM that eventually engulfed Top 40; follow-up Nocturnes repurposed fast-paced thumping melodies from electronica’s past, presaging present-day dance’s streak of ’90s-informed nostalgia. Working Girl feels like her most comprehensive self-portrait to date, a series of keyboard-pounding, strobing songs built around a common theme — what it’s like to be a woman in the workforce, as its title suggests — that Hesketh made totally on her own terms.
With total autonomy, the singer maintains that her mission remains the same: bridging the gap between accessibility and avant-garde. “I want to make up the most poppy music in the most weird way I can, so I’m just constantly trying to marry these two worlds of pop and rock,” she says. “You’re in this iffy place the minute you start making records thinking about pleasing others. That’s your downfall, that means something’s going wrong.] I’ve really learned to ignore all that outside noise.”
Little Boots does acknowledge, though, that while she’s going it alone now, she didn’t actually create Working Girl by herself. The album sports production from New York synth-wave artist Com Truise and suddenly in-demand Grammy winner Ariel Rechtshaid, their chime-heavy melodies providing billowing support for her controlled, breathy sighs. “I’m not very good at working on my own,” she says with a chuckle. “I need people, I need sounding boards. Go and look up all the best pop songs, all your favorite pop songs. I bet you there’ll be one in one hundred that was written by one person. Very few people absolutely do the whole entire things themselves, because you go crazy. You’ve got no cheerleader, no person who’s going to throw out the rubbish.”
Working Girl is undeniably a dance record — there are synthesizers ripped straight from the Depeche Mode’s finest moments, staggering hooks, C+C floor-filling drum machines, and truncated, stuttering xylophones all throughout its 13 tracks — and Little Boots admits that pulling all of the tracks together to tell a story proved difficult. “It’s all over the place, but it’s just reflective of me as a person,” she says. “I had this idea for a character of the working girl, and a world revolving for her or around her or about her. Sometimes it was me, and sometimes it wasn’t really, and I think maybe that got the songs to hang together production-wise. It’s quite a big job really”.
I think that Working Girl is a fantastic and satisfying album where Little Boots shows why she is one of our very best artists. I am looking forward to seeing if a fourth studio album does arrive. Before concluding, I want to balance reviews. The reason why I think Working Girl warrants a new spin is because some were more mixed. For example, this is what Drowned in Sound observed when they sat down with the album:
“Victoria Hesketh’s metamorphosis from lead singer of indie-poppers Dead Disco to wry electro solo act Little Boots may not have changed the face of music as we know it, but it was pretty savvy: a low key bellwether for the end of indie’s Noughties dominance, and the beginning of a decade where producer-led digital pop has pretty much been the only game in the charts.
But if Hesketh was the prophet for this new world, she didn’t exactly reap its rewards. Debut album Hands and attendant hit single ‘Remedy’ certainly did a hell of a lot more business than anything put out by the band she’d been in just a year before. But it wasn’t enough to make her a household name. She parted with Atlantic, and four years later the more sophisticated, less endearingly wonky Nocturnes failed to replicate its predecessor’s success, despite going some way to anticipate the revival of Nineties house on the top 40.
Like Nocturnes, third album Working Girl is far from tuneless. But it seems to have slightly unusual priorities. It is a pop nerd’s album, worked on by a bunch of interesting producers (Ariel Rechtshaid, Chris Carmouche, Grades, Com Truise, Jeppe Laursen, Jas Shaw) and clearly within the dance-pop oeuvre. But can it really be described as ‘pop music’ in its purest terms when it’s unwilling to seriously make a play for your endorphins, and its best moments are in fact the least poppy?
The wonky playfulness of yore is long gone; there's now an underlying coldness to Little Boots’ music, and the best stuff here is when she embraces that and doesn’t try and sound like a modern pop star at all. ‘Get Things Done’ rides in on a walloping, frisky bassline and has a strangely menacing chorus refrain – “we know how to get things done” – that vaguely recollects The Pet Shop Boys at their most imperious. ‘Taste It’ has a nervy, unsettling minimalism and almost feels like it could have slid onto the last Knife album if they’d been fractionally more welcoming about things.
The record, by-the-by, comes saddled with a concept. Working Girl is named after the 1989 Melanie Griffiths film of the same name, and the lyrics deal with the work and the work life. There is a lot of stuff in the artwork referencing late Eighties/early Nineties business fashion. There is certainly something interesting about it, but it’s also a bit hard to embrace wholeheartedly. Is it meant to be a kitsch joke? A nod to an increasingly revered era of music? It sounds in principal like it should be a fun wheeze, but this is not especially fun music.
One suspects that working with six different producers doesn’t help in making a coherent concept album, but the frustration is that Hesketh rarely grabs her own record by the scruff of the neck, doesn’t have the strength of personality to really sell whatever she’s selling to the listener. With her smooth, light vocals and classy but never ostentatious tunes, she feels like a distillation of a thesis about what good, intelligent pop should be without quite being it.
Housey tracks like ‘Real Girl’ and ‘No Pressure’ don’t want for hooks or sense of contemporaneity, but Hesketh’s cold, thin vocal never delivers them with great conviction - they do sound like hits, but hits for another singer. Little Boots is closer to her element when left of centre – the icy intensity of ‘Business Pleasure’ works immaculately, but it’s not in any way a future smash.
She hits enough gold to not seem like an irrelevance, but her goals are murky – a prophet whose predictions all came true, and is now unsure what’s left for her”.
To shift the focus towards the positive, I think AllMusic’s review is closer to getting to the heart of Working Girl. With so much quality on display, it is an album that offers so much:
“With a title inspired in part by the 1988 comedy-drama of the same name, Little Boots' third full-length album, 2015's Working Girl, showcases her trademark atmospheric '70s disco and '80s house-infused pop with ever increasing aplomb. A concept album, Working Girl revolves around Victoria Hesketh's (aka Little Boots') own journey from major-label fame with Atlantic Records in 2009 to independent success after founding On Repeat Records in 2013. The album follows Hesketh's equally conceptually minded 2014 EP Business Pleasure (all four tracks are included here) and finds her expanding upon that album's dual themes of creative transformation and professional empowerment. Working with a bevy of arty dancefloor-familiar producers including Simian Mobile Disco's Jas Shaw, Com Truise, and Chris Carmouche (Janelle Monáe, Major Lazer), Hesketh has constructed album of arch, laser-like sophistication, punctuated by moments of euphoric passion. Cuts like the title track, "Taste It," and "Real Girl" are languid, exotic anthems that balance Hesketh's thoughtful D.I.Y. feminist point of view with subtle cheekiness and a winking sense of camp. Whether she's singing about taking control of her creative process, her career, or even her sexuality, Hesketh imbues Working Girl with a confident swagger.
It's as if she's reimagined her herself as an '80s power suit-wearing heroine in a film about her life; a cinematic ice queen CEO commanding the boardroom in stilettos. As she defiantly coos on "Business Pleasure, "I'm not your girl in the machine/I won't give up on my daydream." Which isn't to say there aren't moments of red-hot passion on Working Girl. On the contrary, cuts like "Get Things Done" and the sparkling club anthem "Desire," are whip-crack funky and utterly infectious, bringing to mind Vogue-era Madonna. Ultimately, Working Girl plays like Little Boots' own biopic, a cinematic feminist synth-pop manifesto set to a pulsing Giorgio Moroder-esque soundtrack”.
Go and listen to the album if you have not already. Whilst it won some great press, it is a shame that some did not see the true strength and nuance of Working Girl. Despite the number of producers credited, the overall sound and consistency is good. It is definitely Little Boots’ voice and personality that comes to the fore. Working Girl debuted at number sixty-seven on the U.K. chart, selling 1,425 copies in its first week. With some new music out in the world (the track, Silver Balloons, came out a month or so ago), I have been listening back to her previous work. In a strong and fascinating career, I was compelled to re-explore Working Girl. To me, it is an underrated and solid album that deserves some…
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