Had I been in a more cynical frame of mind I could have summed this album up simply by pointing out that it feels like nothing more than a record company’s opportunistic attempts to foist another Avril Lavigne onto an unsuspecting world and could, quite happily, have left it there. However, I feel duty bound as a reviewer for this fine magazine to furnish the reader with a few more details. And so to work…
Girl Next Door is a fairly mainstream collection of polished pseudo-angst; MOR-AOR-Drivetime-Compilation fodder that will doubtless occupy a small army of publicists, stylists and photographers for as long as it takes to get the singles from the album onto heavy rotation at MTV.
Toucan Entertainment have groomed this act, led them to a US top 60 chart placing and are now about to unleash them on the UK. So what exactly do we have to look forward to?
Well, we have a sexily pouting bleach-blonde girl in a mini-skirt and leather jacket flanked by some Hell’s Angels wannabes who look like an identity parade from Never Mind the Buzzcocks. We have (according to the press release) singer Marti Dodson‘s leg warmers, much coveted by female fans ( the smitten lads apparently preferring her socks). And we have the songs: A collection of Anastacia/Pink outtakes on the predictable themes of ex-boyfriends and plain girls-next-door secretly intimidated by the local beauty queen. We have shiny pop-rock where choruses ride along on top of power chords neutered by compression and produced to within an inch of their lives, and we have Dodson’s voice sliding effortlessly from fake snarl to ballsy song bird as required.
Alongside the tepid rock work outs of tracks such as Who’s Cryin Now and Don’t Stop are slightly quieter moments, like the acoustic guitar-based Reasons Why with a riff reminiscent of Madonna’s Don’t Tell Me.
Lyrics are either a painting-by-numbers look at relationships, such as on Happy where Dodson proclaims that her joy at seeing her ex with a new love is such that ‘she could cry’; or muted tirades against shallow glamour-pusses and inconstant lovers that come across as sub-Alannis Morrisette snarls, faintly barbed but ultimately sugar-coated.
And at this point, dear reader, I become superfluous to the proceedings as by now, I’m sure you can imagine the rest of the album.
Another take on all this would be to say that these are well produced, catchy pop songs and I shouldn’t really be griping – it’s just that I can somehow sense a small army of fully grown adults working full time to convince us all that it is something more than that. It isn’t.
But you know what they say – one person’s ‘bland’ is another’s ‘accessible’, so I’ll leave you to decide. Now, where’s my Throbbing Gristle CD?