teentoday.co.uk

The Saturdays - Headlines review

16 comments | Published by Rach Read

You, your gran and some aliens from the planet Zog probably know about the rocky relationship between teentoday.co.uk and The Saturdays by now. We love them, we hate them, we wanna be them (well, Una anyway) – but however we feel about them, you could never accuse us of being indifferent. Until now, that is as the whole Headlines project is very easy to be indifferent about.

Is it an EP? Is it a re-release? Is it a half-arsed collection of four new songs, one cover and three old ones with no real sense of purpose and more Autotune than the entire cast of Glee (yes, even Cory Monteith)? Make up your own minds but here’s our track-by-track review:

Sugababes - Sweet 7 album review

3 comments | Published by Rach Read

I’m not even going to mention the ‘K’ word. Yet the Sweet 7 era has been a disheartening experience – how could a band whose last album positively ached with beauty, emotion and harmonies be reduced to a dance routine that involves smacking each other on the arse? How could a band who were always ahead, or at least bang on, musical trends be so desperately, unimaginatively chasing the zeitgeist?

Gabriella Cilmi - Ten album review

2 comments | Published by Rach Read

Sometime before Pixie Lott was the new Amy Winehouse, Gabriella Cilmi was the old new Amy Winehouse. Not that you’d guess from Cilmi’s sexpot space cadet re-invention in her latest video, On A Mission. And frankly, we’re not complaining. Turns out the lessons learned from Cilmi’s dull MOR debut (it was called Lessons To Be Learned, we just made a possibly too subtle pun, enjoy!) were that, come second album time, she’s discovered she has a stonking pair of pins that we never saw thanks to all that sitting-on-a-stool nonsense, she’s learnt the arts of a basic, if silly, dance routine and most importantly, she’s developed an inclination towards pop.

Introducing Eliza Doolittle… rather RANTY EP review

8 comments | Published by Olly Meakings

We’ve been about as keen to introduce you to Eliza Doolittle as our racist aunty who pops her teeth on the table during Eastenders. But after an iPod shuffle mishap led to an unfortunate baby punching incident in Tescos we’ve been told by our Doctor that it would be good for our wellbeing - and that of the general public - if we ‘get it off our chest’. Hit “see more”.

Alphabeat - The Beat Is… album review

2 comments | Published by Rach Read

Alphabeat’s Fascination may well be one of my favourite songs of the last decade. Essentially Footloose re-spun Scandi-style, ground-breaking stuff it certainly wasn’t, but sold with such a boundless joie de vivre that you couldn’t help but smile (and the ‘Word is on your lips… say the word!’ section is just shiny pop brilliance). Sadly but perhaps not unexpectedly, there is nothing to match Fascination, or even some of This Is Alphabeat’s lesser moments, on new record The Beat Is…

Ke$ha - Animal album review (and stream the WHOLE album FREE)

8 comments | Published by Rach Read

Ke$ha stares confrontationally from Animal’s sleeve in all her nose-ringed glory, sporting a style that’s more ‘morning after the night before’ than ‘eight hours a night and five a day’. Her songs involve vomming in Paris Hilton’s closet and brushing her teeth with Jack Daniels and she uploads videos of herself stealing from charity bins. Forget aspirational figures or girls-next-door, Ke$ha’s success seems to herald the arrival of a whole new breed of pop star. But whilst critics sneer and prudes shirk, Ke$ha’s trashtastic image may just be a smokescreen that’s having the last laugh – Kesha Sebert’s actually an industry veteran (scoring co-writes for The Veronicas and Miley Cyrus) with enough demos floating around the web to suggest she could have put out a 30-track version of Animal with no significant drop in quality. That is to say, Animal is bloody good stuff.