Sunday, July 24, 2011

The Saturdays' new single is a grower not a shower - listen to 'All Fired Up' now

Always put your best foot forward.
Until very recently (read: yesterday) we weren't really sure how to feel about The Saturdays.  They started out as a sort of Girls Aloud/Sugababes hybrid, and looked, for a while, poised to step into the vacant ULTIMATE GIRLBAND POPFORCE FIERCENESS shoes that were left behind when both those bands went on a spa holiday or whatever the hell it was they were doing instead of making music.  

For whatever reason, though, The Saturdays just never had their breakout moment.  Sure they've been holding it down as a solid second-tier group with a string of top tens under their Gucci belts, but they've not really given anyone a reason to really care about them as a musical force. Until now.

'All Fired Up' finds The Saturdays pushing the envelope for the first time in their four years of existence.  And it works pretty damn well, since for once they aren't trailing after everyone else, chucking out tunes that sound as if they were cobbled together from superior groups' leftover scraps.

As tonally arresting as the tune is, though, there's no hook to pull the casual listener in.  It takes a few listens to really appreciate what The People Who Tell The Saturdays What To Sing were trying to do, but once it clicks, IT CLICKS.  And oddly, the fact that it's not an obvious hit might be exactly what makes it huge.

Every Saturdays song so far has been so straightforward and rudimentary that it could be consumed fully in one listen.  They were songs that made hundreds of thousands of people say "oh, that's nice, I think I'll download it and then never listen to it again," - songs that get the job done, but that can never turn a girlgroup into a PROPERLY GENIUS BAND.

So really what we're saying is that The Saturdays needed something special, and finally, 3 albums in, they got it.  'Fired' premiered yesterday, and it's a tuneless, raved-up, lyrically nonsensical clubfest that leaves the listener confused, sweaty, exhausted and smelling of Jaegermeister. 

And it is amazing.