Hands

I’ve grown a love for this period of purposefully dumb, glitzy, recession-era electropop anthems recently… but Hands just isn’t really doing it for me. For one, the songs are overly wordy- for an electropop album it’s surprisingly lyric-heavy and despite the lyrics themselves still being kitschy and relationship-focused as is to be expected I also think the wordiness of the tracks as well as the way Little Boots is delivering them just kinda clashes with the overall feel of the album. And speaking of the album’s overall feel, I’m not that impressed by the instrumentals here either. They basically sound like what you’d expect from an electropop album, and of course that isn)t bad but there were tons of artists at this point creating similar sounding albums but in a more interesting way. It’s not like there aren’t highlights- I think the opening track ‘New In Town’ is genuinely excellent and the song ‘Symmetry’ with Philip Oakey of the Human League is a late highlight- but on the whole I think the steps Hands takes to stand out from the crowd aren’t more to its detriment than anything.