It’s strange how, when it comes to pop, rules of taste develop that are often along largely arbitrary lines. For example, no self-respecting muso would ever confess to liking The Spice Girls, while sages whose record collection contains every Neu! Album ever made are happy to out themselves as Girls Aloud fans. Apart from the alarming sexual frankness displayed by the latter (given that the target market remains very young girls), I find it hard to tell the difference, musically.
Local singer-songwriter Julia EK Thomas has made an album which is pitched squarely at the girly pop market, and at a guess I’d say she was heavily inspired by Cheryl Cole’s crowd of decorous mannequins. There’s a little bit of rock in there, some nifty modern production, lots of multi-tracked Julias, and plenty of post-feminist, condom-in-the-handbag sexuality.
The quality of music is widely variable, but there are some strong tunes. The piano-driven ‘Come get Naked with Me’ is smart, sexy and rocking (albeit in a restrained, respectable fashion), with Thomas’s voice alternately breathy, girly and growling, demonstrating her versatility in the course of one song. Her four-piece band is admirably tight and sympathetic to the voice, although there is a negligible electric guitar solo that should have been snipped at the editing stage.
‘Summer Lovin’ High’ is beautifully produced and musically very pretty, all lush acoustic guitars, piano octaves, and drowsy string pads, but the chorus comes over as pretty cheesy: I’m not sure how even Stravinsky could make the setting of the words “You and I together, You and me forever” remotely interesting. There’s commercial pop and there’s hackneyed tripe, and it’s a fine line.
‘1234’ is a somewhat misandric piece of synth-pop which really should be on a Girls Aloud record, due to its brain-distressingly catchy chorus (actually, most of Girls Aloud’s music has a man-hating subtext if you really think about it. Well, their main singer is Ashley Cole’s wife, poor cow). The so-terrible-it’s-good ‘Cinderella’s Radiator’ has the worst lyrics ever written by any being with opposable thumbs, but everyone in the world should hear it: how can one commit war crimes and murder when you’re rolling around on the ground laughing?
“Cinderella should have smashed up that Shoe
Sleeping Beauty should have rolled over and just pressed ‘Snooze'”
This is not the sort of song which is sung, more belted out. I’d pay money to hear a Susan Boyle cover.
The record ends with ‘Party People’, a lively piece of non-threatening funk which brings this uneven record to a strong end. The main criticism overall is that Thomas has combined a high level of musical sophistication with very basic lyrical content. You just know that despite the surface dumbness of ‘Some Kind of Oooh’, there is a host of balding fifty-year old lyricists churning out draft after draft in a Hammersmith basement before it gets anywhere near the studio. Julia, despite being a fine musician, probably needs to acquire a capacity for honing.