The resurgence of America’s love for boy bands has simply been for the lack of a better word, baffling. Whether they’re our own dated cts appealing to the former tweens/ now soccer moms crowd, or the UK imports that have dominated the radio, for one reason or nother we simply can’t get enough of young boys with flashy dance sequences choreographed to
“Love Song #12”. Oddly enough, this trend hasn’t not lead to an American re-interest in girl groups. Destiny’s Child was arguable the last girl group anyone in America cared about and only receives any mention today when someone wants to bother reading Beyonce’s Wikipedia page.
But someone forgot to tell the UK girl groups are over because the land that brought you The Spice Girls has been churning them out since the early 90s. And if the numbers are any indication, they’re showing no signs of stopping. It’s in this market that we find the ladies of The Saturdays, relatively young but immensely popular in England hoping to break in the U.S.
With the success of One Direction, The Wanted, Adele and Jessie J., it’s not much a of a stretch to imagine another pop act from the UK can make it big in an American market, especially one with a massive established fan base back home. That and the little fact their U.S. and Canadian debut EP happens to coincide with the premiere of their reality show (not coincidentally also called “Chasing the Saturdays”) and it seems the ladies have got the ambition and the marketing machine to crack the US top 20 charts. Unfortunately,
if the music is anything to go by, their USA goodwill tour will be a short one.
“Chasing the Saturdays” is meant to be a teaser of sorts for the group, consisting of five songs; four of them already established hits in the UK. What’s troubling about this is the drawn conclusion that the word “hits” is obviously thrown around a lot over there. “Light Up” is not only the worst song on the EP, but it’s also a compilation of everything wrong with today’s pop; too much over production, too much emphasis on dissociable club beats, soul-less voices and terrible hackney lyrics. Nothing about “Light Up” implies it wasn’t written in 20 minutes and produced with a laptop. “Higher” is slightly better (featuring an awkwardly thrown in guest verse by Flo-Rida) but is still only good for this EP rather than good compared to current US top 40 fair. “Notorious” takes the cake for the worst lyrics with the verse “I’m a big boss, I’m a gangster,” delivered with a straight face. At least “Ego” attempts to
take a stab at half-way decent lyric structure and only drops the ball partially by rhyming solo with ego. The only stand out, oddly enough, is the one new song “What About Us?” which surprises by being surprisingly good. The production isn’t so overbearing and you can actually make out the
individual group members singing voices to find out they’re actually pretty good. Even the added on verse by Sean Paul is timed just right to elicit
an involuntary smile. But as a whole, “Chasing the Saturdays” is dead on arrival, and barring some miracle, these ladies may not want to invest
in any U.S. real estate anytime soon.
