Girls Aloud are as huge a pop act as the UK has seen in the past decade, yet they've never so much as dented the American charts. Cheryl Cole, Sarah Harding, Nadine Coyle, Nicola Roberts, and Kimberley Walsh were put together on the reality show Popstars: The Rivals in 2002, and they proceeded to score 20 consecutive British Top 10 singles over the next seven years. That series of hits may well be their legacy, despite the fact that they've reunited for four new songs on this retrospective, their second greatest hits compilation to date.
The most obvious comparison for Girls Aloud is, of course, Spice Girls: cheerful! Euro! girl-power-y! But it might be a little more accurate to compare them to the mid-60s-era Supremes, a group whose presence is all about charm and restraint, and whose behind-the-scenes powerhouse is a brilliantly original writing and production team. In roughly the same way that the Supremes of the period from "Where Did Our Love Go" to "Reflections" were the vocal adjuncts to Holland-Dozier-Holland, Girls Aloud are basically the most prominent performing associates of Xenomania, the UK song-factory collective centered on Brian Higgins.
Xenomania has cranked out dozens of European hits over the past 15 years, for acts like Pet Shop Boys, Sugababes, and Kylie Minogue. They don't exactly have a signature sound, although they do have a signature songwriting style, which seems to consist of writing a lot of songs, then chopping them up into pieces, keeping the catchiest parts, and seeing which ones can be sutured together into new songs. The best Xenomania songs tend to come off like miraculously coordinated mini-suites; the second-rank ones sound more like "Stars on 45"-style medleys.
Girls Aloud, as it happens, got a lot of the best ones. The utterly wonderful "Biology" starts with a Chicago electric blues riff, of all things; that gets supplanted by a string of increasingly amazing Eurotechno melodies, the last of which-- the nominal chorus, which finally shows up two minutes in-- somehow transforms itself straight back into the blues riff again. "Biology" also features one of the proud Britishisms that are all over their records: "We're gonna cause a conTROversy," Coyle wails. "The Loving Kind", which Pet Shop Boys co-wrote with Xenomania, pulls off another one by rhyming its title with "disinclined."
As you might expect, Xenomania grab hooks wherever they can find them, and another other way of listening to Girls Aloud's hits is to try to catch all the allusions to the past 50 years' worth of pop as they whizz by. "Love Machine"-- no relation to either the Miracles' or Morning Musume's respective hits called "Love Machine"-- borrows its groove from the Smiths' "Rusholme Ruffians", its chorus melody from the Beatles' "Baby You're a Rich Man", and a stray lyric from Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes", for starters. It also contains one of their funniest lines: "We're gift-wrapped kitty cats/ We're only turning into tigers when we gotta fight back."
The big difference between the 00s-style song machine and that of the 60s is that-- at least for Xenomania's strain of pop-- it's no longer important to make a song's lyrics sketch out a narrative or emotional state. Xenomania's cut-and-paste method often means that Girls Aloud's lyrics, as smoothly as they scan, are vestigial or incoherent. Compare "No Good Advice" with the Supremes' song on a similar theme of parental warnings, "You Can't Hurry Love", and stray lines that don't really belong start to poke out of the Girls Aloud record: "I don't need no special fix to anesthetize me"? "I dig the music that I'm making, baby, and I'll break it into your brain"?
That's a quibble, though. The broader fault of Ten is that it isn't the ABBA Gold-caliber wonder that Girls Aloud deserves as a greatest hits collection. The group's pointless covers of the Pretenders' "I'll Stand By You" and the Pointer Sisters' "Jump" were big British hits, but they already sound more dated than anything else here. Then there are the new songs, only two of them Xenomania-written. The group's comeback single, "Something New", is a game approximation of the Girls Aloud of seven years ago. But the others just drag the album down-- "Beautiful Cause You Love Me", in particular, belongs on the same icky-valentine shelf as James Blunt's "You're Beautiful".
Momentum is everything for this kind of pop act, and the fact that the one-year break Girls Aloud announced in 2009 turned into three years off suggests that the group isn't the top priority for its members (or for Xenomania) any more. Four of them have embarked on solo careers to varying degrees of success (and Harding's debut album is due in 2013). They may have a second wave in them, perhaps an equivalent of the Supremes' "Stoned Love", "Nathan Jones", "Floy Joy" era. The virtue of Girls Aloud's best songs, though, is that the next part is always even better than the one you're listening to until, suddenly, they're over.
