Little Boots

Working Girl

(On Repeat)

For a while there, I thought Victoria 'Little Boots' Hesketh had found her footing with the coffee-table electropop of second album Nocturne. Sure, she had knowingly placed herself at the centre of a Venn diagram whose sets were equal parts Madonna, Kylie and Goldfrapp, but the end result was an improvement on her overproduced debut Hands, with its forced forays into cabaret.

However, any one of those aforementioned ladies could take Working Girl's classy production sound and deliver something much more substantial than Hesketh's efforts. It's certainly not the studio work that's at fault here: although the songs put on their dancing shoes when necessary, the overall mood is more mature than on Nocturne and Hands.

No, the problem lies in lyrics that never once do justice to the music around them. "It's so hard, it's so hard for a working girl/Come so far, come so far for a working girl" goes Working Girl. "You were my hero, I was your heroine/You were my hero, I was your heroine" goes Heroine. You get the (very limited) idea.

Too often here I find my brain retreating to a far corner of the production, desperately searching for something to keep me connected, knowing that yet another lyrically inane chorus is between me and the end of the track.

Alan Morrison