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If Lady Gaga has proven anything, it's that the realms of
teenybopper Hot 100 pop and delirious club-oriented electro are a lot
closer than music executives expected. As the 21st century has
developed, more and more hitmakers are putting aside the soul samples
and brass players for an army's worth of stomping, fist-pumping synthesizers.
Anyone observing the way in which Kanye West's music has
developed since The College Dropout can see it. Enter The Saturdays,
plying their trade as a pure-pop group in the Gaga era. Headlines, their third album, is a quick eight song
listen that's as cozily charming as it is needless, never inducing a
reaction greater than a bystanding nod. Where once were Bananarama, The Spice Girls, Girls Aloud and the various and continuing incarnations of Sugababes now stalk their imitators.
Unsurprisingly for a girl group designed to appeal to tweens and manufactured to order, there
is nothing provocative about The Saturdays; in fact, they're
rather retro in their way, evoking that late '90s, pre-packaged,
big business music that hasn't dominated the globe since
N' Sync and The Backstreet Boys finished their run of success.
This kind of synthetic pop has been thoroughly designed to burrow into unquestioning
brains, and each of the tracks that make up Headlines are
immediate and easy to jump around to, with no emotional
baggage (or any real sonic tension) to keep them from having any buffer
between the head and the hips. It's like a combination of the giant
electro of 2009 with the tame fluffiness of 1998.
But of course, nobody talks about the boy band era for its classic
records. The same is true of The Saturdays, whose charm doesn't translate well
over the weight of a full album's listen. As individual capsules, the
songs work well. Karma and the Starsmith remix of
One Shot are both booming, speaker-cracking, club-banging, radio-friendly pop. But even those
highlights are neutered when played back to back.
Other tracks sound over-borrowed. Forever Is Over in particular
sounds markedly similar to a certain chart-topping Canadian's
Somebody To Love. There isn't enough to these songs to merit more
than a cursory scan; the band's sole moment of wryness, Missing
You, is only elevated because of a few unexpected lyrical quirks, and
that most certainly doesn't carry the song into 'essential'
territory.
With Gaga, the listener is kept on the edge of
their seat (if they've somehow refrained from leaping off it for a boogie); at any point the
album could derail into silly, abstract
mythology or uncomfortable imagery. There isn't any of that risk with
The Saturdays, who stay at the same safe tempo, hit the same safe notes,
and stick to the same safe themes for all 30 minutes of the album. Headlines
is partially saved by its brief running time, but when your (or whoever's) music is
already running out of steam at the 20 minute mark, some
reconsidering needs to be done.
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