Little Boots & Portmanteau

Before I heap praise onto Portmanteau for their cool electro tracks, I must admit I felt a sizable level of apprehension about initially giving their tracks a listen. First off, the name Portmanteau. Calm down guys, we didn’t all go to Ivy League schools here. I like my electro groups to have monosyllabic, at most disyllabic names. Daft Punk, Justice, Danger. See what I mean, easy. I can’t even pronounce the last part of their name, let alone spell it. Once I overcame the confusion their name caused, I began reading the email and found this, “Portmanteau combines live instrumentation, children's instruments, synthesisers, samplers, visuals, and their owl known only as "the Colonel".” I think the presence of any animal in a track (especially one ironically named “the Colonel”) is enough to make any electro fan stop and think for a second. I don’t claim to speak for all electro fans but I’m sure most would agree that we don’t want “experimental” music, we want bangers made for maximum dancefloor grinding. The Looks not Pet Sounds.

However, it didn’t take long for my love of new music to quell my rising apprehension and I downloaded the tracks anyway. And what can I say, they are good. I didn’t even hear an owl in any of the tracks, but I did hear the rest of the good stuff mentioned in their email. My two favorite tracks, Thouse and Defibrilator, are included below. Check out more tracks here.

Portmanteau – Thouse [YSI]
Portmanteau - Defibrilator [YSI]

*No animals were hurt during the making of these songs (not sure if this is true, but I don’t want PETA on my ass).

My anchor for today is the new Little Boots track, Meddle. Meddle is another anchor track that I’m not being totally cynical about. I became an instant fan of Dead Disco (which Little Boots was a member of) after I downloaded their self-titled EP and the numerous remixes of their work. So when I heard Dead Disco was actually dead, of course I was like, “WTF?” Then, I heard Little Boots was gonna keep up the good fight and release more music on her own and I was like, “YES!” Stuck on Repeat, Little Boots’ first release was pretty dope and Meddle is also dope. So there you go, this is not simply a shameless attempt at more blog hits.

Little Boots - Meddle [YSI] *Removed upon label's request.