UK pop group Girls Aloud have always come on like a frenzied, fever dream of a pop group, grown in laboratories and let loose on an unsuspecting public with predictably violent results. So it's no surprise that their greatest hits, arriving after only three album's worth of singles, is as exhausting as it is captivating, a whirlwind trip through bizarre but lovable pop gadgetry that may leave the uninitiated reeling.
The story of Girls Aloud is as much the story of Xenomania, the reclusive pop production team whose vision shines through every song here. The performers remain a key ingredient, demonstrating an impressive knack for perfectly executing the demands of their material. If I don't know who is who and who does what, it's largely because their strident, at times obnoxious, performances rarely slip up enough for me to wonder. Their brief is to be snotty sirens, delivering reference-laden one-liners with their tongues stuck firmly in their cheeks. One-liners they are: While Girls Aloud are frequently blessed with excellent lyrics, their clever allusions are usually more amusing than affecting, with only the unalloyed spite and frustration of early classic "No Good Advice" and the gentle tenderness of recent ballad "Whole Lotta History" really cutting through.
But Girls Aloud don't need to steal my heart when the rest of me has already been seduced by their deathless hooks and multi-genre pyrotechnics, starting from new wave drum & bass and expanding to embrace elements of electroclash, big beat, and even skiffle, in songs stuffed to the gills with two, three, sometimes four different choruses, sounding like patchwork assemblages of the best bits of a hundred fantasy pop songs, smoothly and effortlessly changing gears at a moment's notice.
The greatest advantage of the Girls Aloud/Xenomania combination is the sense of simpatico which allows the respective parties to push themselves further than they would otherwise-- the only faltering moments here are the straightforward covers of the Pointer Sisters' "Jump (For My Love)" and the Pretenders' "I'll Stand By You", uncharacteristic crises of confidence in the unpredictable pop nous of the partnership. Always good for a chorus, the risk for Girls Aloud and their producers is that of stagnation: The three new songs' churning, steroid-pumped electro-pop (think Bananarama meets Transvision Vamp) is enjoyable but also less startling than before, a refinement of an already perfected blueprint. Having come to rely on Girls Aloud outflanking them at every term, fans are unlikely to be inclined to settle for less.
The Sugababes are frequently touted as the most edgy, subversive UK pop group, although beyond their brilliant collaboration with Richard X on a Numan-sampling cover of Adina Howard's "Freak Like Me", their unsmiling façades, and frequent lineup changes, it can be hard to see why: The trio's songs are generally more in line with broader trends in pop or r&b than Girls Aloud's polystylistic romps, their lyrics usually more pedestrian. The kernel of truth to the critical line cum marketing angle lies in the group's vocals, which make a good argument for them being the best pop act of this decade-- perhaps less startling than Girls Aloud, but finally more endearing.
Initially dominated by the indie fragility of Siobhan Donaghy, the Sugababes only really hit their stride after her sudden exit following their first (and weakest) album One Touch, whose hesitant r&b-for-bedsits at least resulted in fantastically winsome singles. The reformed lineup was more confident and expansive, powered by its delicate balancing of Keisha Buchanan's sweet clarity, Siobhan-replacement Heidi Range's trembling diva grandeur, and the unadorned husky simplicity of the recently departed Mutya Buena, whom Xenomania's Brian Higgins claimed (perhaps correctly) was the UK's finest pop vocalist since Dusty Springfield.
Names are important here: While the singers of Girls Aloud are perfectly aligned with their song's intentions, the Sugababes' personalities constantly exceed the borders of their own material, only to dissolve into empathetic chorus harmonies. Sweetly girlish early on, these harmonies have become majestic and at times unabashedly emotional; while people may remember the group for their frothy pop ("Freak Like Me", "Hole in the Head", "Push the Button"), their greatest hits collection Overloaded is equally impressive for its devastatingly earnest balladry.
Frustratingly, many of their finest efforts were never chosen as singles, but then it appears that Sugababes, in all their incarnations, have never quite understood their own strengths, stumbling into brilliance by accident and almost as regularly going off the rails. Never more so than today: Mutya's replacement Amelle Berrabah simply sounds like a throatier facsimile of her predecessor, and while in principle there's no reason for her not to succeed as Heidi has, for a group whose charms are so precariously positioned, she might also be the fatal tipping point. The two new songs on Overloaded reveal the pitfalls of reading your own press, with the group attempting to reverse engineer the brand of cool that is commonly given to them via a limpid and largely tuneless rock-pop hybrid. Some of their collaborators know what they don't: Xenomania's four technicolor singles here portray a group so triumphantly insouciant they can afford to make pure, unashamed pop, improbably balancing disaffectedness with conviction. Whether it's going for the pop jugular or letting their tears smudge their eyeliner, the Sugababes are at their best when they do all the things the cool girls aren't supposed to.
