The Beat Surrender

I know what you are thinking when you’ve read the score I’ve given the album. “Typical indie-centric review of a pop album, as doesn’t want to seem un-cool”. Well let me break that myth for you right now. I’m not cool anyway so that doesn’t matter and I actually quite like the Sugababes, I think there is a real place for them in music.

I won’t go into a big tirade about everyone needing a little bit of pop in their lives as that is a well worn path I’ve been down before. Of all the pop acts that have been around over the last ten years though, they have shown not just durability (albeit with several line up changes), but also a willingness to develop their sound.

The early indications on Catfights And Spotlights are actually pretty good. It opens with the recent single Girls. A real call to arms that does more for Girl Power in one song than the Spice Girls managed in an entire career, it also uses the Here Come The Girls sample by Allen Toussaint really well, not the first time in their careers the group have built a song around a sample of course.

You On A Good Day follows with it’s funky 1970’s style groove that develops into a classy pop song, it could be a single for definite. No Can Do is a slower track, but it has a really good melody that pulls it through and Hanging On A Star is another track that benefits from strong hooks and a good melody to make it a very catchy track, where otherwise it would have been quite lite.

It’s around this point though that they really lose their way. Side Chick is a poor track, Unbreakable Heart is an average ballad, Sunday Rain is good but then you get the shocking Every Broken Heart up next which has the line “every heart that breaks is a murder one, looking down the barrel of a smoking gun”…awful.

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