The 1960s girl groups went overlooked for so long in part because of their failure, often through no fault of their own, to establish successful long-term careers as album artists. We remember the young women featured on essential box sets like Phil Spector compilation Back to Mono or Rhino's more recent One Kiss Can Lead to Another not for their full-lengths or their larger-than-life exploits, but for their singles. In some cases, as with the Crystals, the artists you heard singing over your car's AM radio weren't even the same ones who came to town to perform.
Initially dreamed up as a modern girl group, the Pipettes have defied this grim logic once before. On 2006 debut We Are the Pipettes, the Brighton, England-based indie-poppers improbably managed a full-length's worth of cheeky, refreshingly contemporary, and wholeheartedly catchy songs to match their polka-dot dresses and choreographed moves. They were "the prettiest girls you've ever met." Your kisses were wasted on them. They were playful, they were divisive, but they were memorable and, to many, instantly appealing.
Four years later, the Pipettes are an almost entirely different group. Unfortunately, at least on Earth vs. the Pipettes, they're also a much, much worse one. It doesn't help that the rotating lineup of vocalists, now down to the sister act of Gwenno and Ani Saunders, trades the breezy, conversational singing style of the debut for a brassy, over-emotive approach that probably wouldn't make it far on a TV talent contest. It doesn't help, either, that what Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal called the "DIY-Spector flourishes" of We Are the Pipettes now give way to synths, disco-funk guitars, clattering bongos, and Miami Sound Machine horns, with plenty of strings and 60s sha-la-la backing vocals still there to clutter the over-crowded mix. It definitely doesn't help that the last few tracks tack on a vague interplanetary conceit, complete with robot vocals proving once and for all that T-Pain has a harder job than you might've thought.
What makes Earth vs. the Pipettes irredeemable, however, is an utter lack of what the Pipettes and their girl-group predecessors once understood so well: distinctive, emotionally affecting pop songs. Self-destructive crushes are nothing new to the girl-group genre, of course, and can be at least as artistically compelling as healthier romances, but tracks like the U2-echoing "Thank You" or redundant soft-rocker "I Always Planned to Stay" ("It's nothing less than what was expected") are full of generic, boring girls pining blandly for generic, boring boys. The rhymes, melodies, and brutally obvious key changes used to stretch weak ideas to an acceptable length-- you've heard them all before. Hell, the outer-space conceit might be fitting, after all, because there's nothing like an actual human being anywhere in these songs; it seems important that the only character with a name is the eponymous officer of the T. Rex-shuffling "Captain Rhythm".
Worst of all, Earth vs. the Pipettes sounds like not just a different group, not just a lesser group but, in sadly off-putting ways, almost an opposite group. "I don't want to hold your hand," sang the 2006 Pipettes, but on this album they ask us to give it to them on at least two separate songs (please "understand"). Where "Pull Shapes" insisted, "Just don't let the music stop," the new single begs for somebody to "Stop the Music". Speaking of "Pull Shapes", for fun slang this time we get "I Vibe You"-- about which the less said the better.
