Music

In their five-year, multi million-selling career, Girls Aloud have pulled off (so to speak) a pretty mean feat: namely, that they straddle two wildly different camps of what is considered ‘cool’. Girls Aloud are equally adored by the Primark-buying, ringtone-downloading, Ant ’n’ Dec watching general public, as they are by high-falutin’, long-word-wielding, ‘high-brow’ critics. My, what magic it is they weave.

And fifth album, ‘Tangled Up’, is sure to be no exception. It’s produced by the British production team Xenomania (who have masterminded all of GA’s LPs, as well as Cher’s ‘Believe’), whose name apparently means ‘an openness and a love of all cultures and influences’. Here, that means that you get an eye-watering array of genres cleverly thrown into the mix, from the clingfilm-flimsy reggae of ‘Control Of The Knife’, to the trebly drum ’n’ bass of ‘What You Crying For’, up to the fuzzy, modern-Motown strut of ‘Can’t Speak French’. For the music nerd, it’s a knickerbocker glory of a treat, with cherries and nuts on top.

And then – for the pissed-up girls roaming city streets coatless and shag-hungry on a Saturday night, there is ‘Fling’ – a rock-riffed call-to-arms which features the righteously squawked chorus, ‘It’s just a fling baby, a bit of ding-a-ling baby, bling baby’. Video-gaming, porn-downloading teenage boys will go for ‘I’m Falling’ with its aggro, ‘Smack My Bitch Up’-style tech-pop and processed coos and squeals.

Fun for everyone then? Not exactly. The tunes are there, certainly: the Girls’ seventeenth single-in-waiting, ‘Call The Shots’, is a magnificent piece of melancholy gym pop and ‘Black Jacks’ is sublimely melodic. But there’s one thing the album falls short on, and that’s a sense of the girls themselves actually having fun; or indeed feeling anything at all. Aesthetically, their voices blend fine, but it’s hard to find any real character; a rasp, a gasp, a laugh, even. Like their (deliberately) robotic dance moves, there isn’t a lot of Girls Aloud that comes across as human or red-blooded (unlike the distinctly muscular, lip-smacking Britney album). In this respect, Girls Aloud are the aural equivalent of the perfect murder, leaving behind no trace that ever they were there.