In another age, the battleground of pop on terrestrial television was, inevitably, Top of the Pops. Even for the teenager of an “alternative” bent, Thursday evenings presented a chance to reinforce allegiances. And besides, there was always the chance that the Jesus and Mary Chain or the Smiths might be on. Such fleeting aberrations seemed positively subversive.

Who, at the time, could have guessed that within two decades this state of affairs would have become completely inverted? By the time Victoria Hesketh, aka Little Boots, made her TV debut last year, there was no Top of the Pops. Amid the musical chop-fest that was Later, it was Hesketh who seemed subversive — sitting at Jools’s joanna and propping a small flashing gizmo on it that provided the stuttering loop of a melodramatic digipop gem called Meddle. Three months later, the 24-year- old from Blackpool won the BBC’s annual Sound of 2009 poll.

People who like to theorise about pop as much as they listen to it will like Hands. But that shouldn’t detract from the fact that they’re not its primary audience. Barely a song goes by without some reference to hearts and their compatibility. Hesketh’s lyrical debt to Europop is so sizeable that there are times — for instance, on Remedy and Earthquake — where it’s almost impossible to believe that she isn’t acting as a Trojan horse for a 48-year-old gay Italian songwriter.

Far from being a problem, this may well be the kernel of her charm. Hesketh’s dogged desire to believe that love is just a question of two uniquely interlocking pieces finding each other may be naivety or rampant denial. On Mathematics (“Nothing can divide a heart plus a heart”), Click (“I thought we clicked like two parts of a puzzle”) and a Phil Oakey double-hander called Symmetry (“Only you can make me feel complete”), it’s by no means clear.

Elsewhere though, the album’s very best moments depict a marginally more complicated picture. Written around a Teutonic synth motif, Stuck On Repeat is love as Stockholm syndrome with added arpeggiating synths, sung with exquisite vulnerability. Ironically though, it’s the hidden track that reveals the most. In eschewing the bells and whistles of electropop for a lone piano, Broken Heart switches the emphasis from Little Boots to Victoria — in the process revealing a wearier familiarity with the vicissitudes of love. By allowing the mask to slip, albeit momentarily, she lends sharp relief to the 12 preceding songs.

(679/Atlantic, TS £12.72)

www.timesselects.co.uk/music

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