Review Summary: I paid £2 for this album, I want my money back, terrible.
For those of you who don’t know, Scouting For Girls are the latest British indie-pop act to spring up from the successes of bands such as Kaiser Chiefs, in a hope to make a name for themselves. The band consists of three members: Roy Stride, Greg Churchouse and Peter Ellard, all of whom sing and play an instrument each - Stride the piano, Churchouse the bass guitar with Ellard on the drums*. To summarise the history of the band they formed sometime in, formed a large-ish fan base on Myspace before, in February 2007 being signed by Sony BMG offshoot Epic UK.
This all sounds very promising, and it was on this basis that I bought said album, highly anticipating some fun, catchy, enjoyable poppy indie. After all, the album had gone double platinum and been top of the UK album chart for two weeks, where was the harm? Well, apparently, the harm lay in putting this innocuous CD into my player and listening to it for the first time.
Because this album is terrible!!! Although I picked this up in a clearance sale, paying the princely sum of £2, I want my money back. Although the music is no doubt intended to be a mix of carefree, childlike fun and catchy choruses, it never quite reaches the mark, instead resulting in a dreadful hybrid of McFly-esque pop and Hoosiers-like indie, which should be hidden away in shame rather than flourished in joy, sort of like a mutated, inbred son.
Lets start with the (few) positives. The songs are almost catchy, the album is consistent and has quite a nice album cover. Unfortunately the songs aren’t catchy enough for you to remember more than a chorus without thinking, the album is consistent only in its dullness, and who cares
that much about album covers anyway??? Now the negatives; well to be honest I don’t know where to start. The vocals are horrible screechy things with a fake kind of Kentish accent (for non-Brits, Kent is just an area of South England). Occasionally the boys fall into that old Bloc Party ‘trick’ of pronouncing ev-er-y syllable in a word, accenting each more than the last so that the word drives through your skull like a high calibre bullet, making sure that you pay attention to the oh so naïve and ***ty lyrics. An example of such would be the horrendous verse from lead single “She’s So Lovely” that goes along the lines of 'She's pretty, A fittie, She got a boyfriend though and that's a pity. She's flirty, turned thirty, Ain't that the age a girl gets really dirty.' Add this to the poor unimaginative bass and drum lines and the infuriatingly annoying peppy piano part into each and every song, and halfway through the album you’ll more than likely have had enough. Oh yeah, and one other thing, every song sounds more or less
exactly the same; to be honest you may as well buy one of the singles, and burn it onto a CD-R eleven times instead of wasting your money buying the album as a whole.
The tempo of the songs never changes, so other than the choruses (easily noticeable to the trained ear by the (often) same three or four words just shouted into the microphone numerous times) the songs are indistinguishable from each other. The only track that really sounds any different to the others is the final track “James Bond” and other than this track I wouldn’t wish to hear any of these tracks again, ever. Unfortunately even the ‘high point’ of the album (“James Bond” in case you hadn’t picked that up) is followed by an excruciatingly cringe worthy tribute to Michaela Strachan, definitely a secret track that should have stayed a secret methinks.
So overall, unless you’re either a young girl or related to one of the band members, I doubt you will get much pleasure from listening to this album. The lyrics are neither witty nor interesting enough for a toddler, the vocals are at times horrific and the rest of the music sounds like it has been thrown together in the worlds largest blender. Most of the tracks sound exactly the same and, even if you liked the singles, you will get bored of this very, very quickly.
Overall 1/5 Awful
*N.B. Recently a fourth member, guitarist Pete Clements, has joined the band, although he made no contribution to this album.
