wears the trousers magazine

The Ting Tings
We Started Nothing ••••
Columbia 

There’s something very appealing about a straight-up catchy pop song. From Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Nite’ right up to Estelle’s (absolutely brilliant) ‘American Boy’, nothing gets a party started like a melody/beat/vocal combo that sticks in your head for days. Which is exactly the kind of thing The Ting Tings have stuffed their debut album with. These are the songs you will already have heard in Topshop, on adverts, as background music in teen dramas like ‘Gossip Girl’, in clubs, in pubs and drifting through the air at festivals. Despite this ubiquity, We Started Nothing remains a very enjoyable record, taking in everything from bratty ’90s-style punk with a Girls Aloud twist to minimal, and at times quite sinister, electropop. 

Katie White’s vocals have a Debbie Harry meets Lily Allen quality that, when twinned with heavy, beat-driven basslines, at first imply that The Ting Tings seem to be laying it on thicker than all the eyeliner in Hoxton. The songs, both slow and fast, tick all the requisite boxes, channelling practically everything from Primal Scream to Technohead’s obnoxious ‘I Wanna Be a Hippy’, cleanly mixed with stomping choruses and shouty lyrics. Subtle it isn’t. It is, however, inexplicably brilliant. ‘That’s Not My Name’ and ‘Shut Up & Let Me Go’ are both instantly recognisable as great singles, undoubtedly already lodged in your brain.

But what about the other songs? Well, ‘We Started Nothing’ plays down and dirty with a bluesy, undulating bassline – a defining characteristic of the album – and songs like ‘Keep Your Head’ are quintessential Friday night jukebox fodder down the pub, guaranteed to get an airing. The Ting Tings’ locomotive energy pushes these songs forwards in a steamy cacophony that has the very effective simultaneous impact of letting them railroad over any lyrical weakness or cliché. And the 1980s echo continues apace with the album’s central tracks, which all liberally ‘borrow’ synths and themes from that currently über-trendy decade. Although they don’t quite pull it off as successfully as, say, Neon Neon, The Ting Tings manage to make every track sound like a potential hit single – no mean feat in the identikit world of modern electro-influenced pop.

Ultimately, The Ting Tings are what you’d get by combining much of contemporary popular music, fusing key modern elements together with guilty-pleasures pastiche to create a messy and self-righteous but very listenable sound. As fun, inevitable and as delicious as a plastic cup of cava in a park, The Ting Tings are the soundtrack of your summer…whether you like it or not.

Seb Law
UK release date: 19/05/08